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“... when she had it, on clothes: in ‘Putting Myself Together’, an essay from 1995, she describes a black corded velvet hat with a tassel at its centre, a crocodile leather handbag, satin scarves fashioned into cravats, a chequered blazer. She was rejected by Mademoiselle magazine (it didn’t hire black girls) before landing ...”

“... hold upon ourselves. And what went on kept going, from grip to give, The narrow milky way in the black ice, The race up, the free passage and return – It followed on itself like a ring of light We knew we’d come through and kept sailing towards. Here is the iterative motion, the abandon, the astrophysical in the playful, that characterises these ...”

“... ten, and depending on the package, families could arrange for candles (soon replaced by flowers), black crepe to drape front doors, basic or baroque hearses with coachmen clad in simple frock-coats or gold-braided uniforms, and coffins of pine board or polished mahogany. With a humble funeral costing as much as 700 francs (4000 francs for a first-class burial ...”

“... Roy: May in Ayemenem is a hot, brooding month. The days are long and humid. The river shrinks and black crows gorge on bright mangoes in still, dustgreen trees. Red bananas ripen. Jack-fruits burst. Dissolute bluebottles hum vacuously in the fruity air. Then they stun themselves against clear windowpanes and die, fatly baffled in the sun. There’s heat but ...”

“... of the central-character, Lancelot Windhover – the obligatory joke about Hopkins features a black American immigration officer who looks like a football player still wearing his shoulderpads. ‘ “Windhover,” said the immigration officer. “I caught this morning morning’s minion ...” ’ It is the situation of three other people, equally the ...”

“... not only river poisoning protection but $412 million worth of tax breaks. Mike Espy, the first black secretary of agriculture, was forced to resign for accepting favours from Don Tyson. During the ten months that Hillary Clinton parlayed $1000 into $100,000 by gambling in cattle and timber futures, her adviser was the counsel to Tyson Foods. Mike ...”

“... Reservation Blues opens with the appearance on the Spokane reservation of a thin old black man who calls himself Robert Johnson – presumably the great Thirties bluesman, long dead in the world outside Alexei’s fiction. Here he’s in flight from someone called ‘The Gentleman’, with whom he has done a deal that would make him the best ...”

“... to be said about the relationship between jazz and the music in musicals. But he does see in The Black Crook, generally considered the grandfather of the musical, an ‘adroit balancing act between seriousness and frank frivolity’ that will inform almost all musical theatre in the following century. And by addressing two very different influences, the ...”

“... a swim and stripped naked. His party followed suit, but Jusserand absentmindedly kept on his black kid climbing gloves. “Eh, Mr Ambassador,” Roosevelt called from the water’s edge, “have you not forgotten something?” Jusserand shouted back: “We might meet ladies.”’ TR’s well-known love of exertion extended to ghosts. As he explained to ...”

“... but I couldn’t withstand the force of Edward’s solicitude, and finally went and bought one. Black. Cashmere. Very nice. I wore it for ages.Edward’s affection enveloped you like a roar, like a cure – even when he became the one who was ill. You felt better every time you saw him. Or rather, you felt you could be better than you were, and you thought ...”

“... of the desk-bound and lionised, and J.M. Coetzee too showed signs of becoming a chronic case. Now Michael Chabon has produced Moonglow, supposedly based on conversations from 1989 between a writer called Michael Chabon and his dying grandfather, an engineer for whom space travel in general and rockets in particular were an ...”

“... the implications for Whitehall should be read by every civil servant. Norton-Taylor observes that Michael Heseltine, like the rest of the Government, was stunned, and stung, by the jury’s verdict, and was determined to fight back, to have the last word, and to keep the pressure on Ponting for as long as possible. The result was that, at quite unusually ...”

“... a further wave of innovation (often referred to as ‘post-Modernism’) after the Second. Beats, Black Mountain Poets, the New York school of the Fifties – all these and others, though clearly different, are unimaginable without Pound, early Eliot, William Carlos Williams and perhaps Wallace Stevens as forerunners. This is the main stream of modern ...”

“... to begin with? If a musician listening to a tape can tell whether the fingers on the keys are black or white, should one tremble to acknowledge that the live voice, instantly distinguishable as male or female, leaves its imprint on the page? Russian is a language in which, given the laws of grammatical concordance, the lyrical ‘I’ must declare its ...”

“... is prescribed for women pilgrims. The Kaaba in Mecca is an approximately cubical building with a black stone set in silver in one of its corners. The pilgrims circumambulate the Kaaba seven times. Then they run backwards and forwards seven times over the short distance between Mecca and Marwa. Then, on the ninth day of Dhu’l-Hijjja (the month of ...”