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“... the colonel, who had suspected him all along for a ‘pink-eyed weakling’. Grann brings out the black comedy of these scenes, where amid harrowing tropical hardships Murray is scolded for having scoffed some communal caramels. Fawcett’s preferred sidekick was Henry Costin, a trusty batman figure who called him ‘chief’. A former corporal and gym ...”

“... are not people at all but cuttlefish in human form: you have only to touch them, and they emit a black cloud.’ The former Yugoslavia has indeed given Ugrešić a specific case which can be used to examine contrapuntally the world she has roamed for the last 20 years, with its migrant workers, refugees, tribalism, faith politics, identity politics, consumer ...”

“... A chapter of Backroom Boys tracks the process by which two Cambridge students, David Braben and Ian Bell, used elegant mathematical fixes to get round the limited memory available on home computers in the early 1980s while writing an epoch-making computer game, Elite: Whether the components are atoms or bits, ideas or steel girders, building something is a ...”

“... he started his affair with Lys (while still married to Jean and while Lys was still married to Ian)? Was Barbara Skelton having an affair with the Polish war artist Feliks Topolski when Peter Quennell came onto the scene, still married to his third wife, Glur, but making Topolski so jealous that the men resorted to fisticuffs over Barbara? What made ...”

“... field of literature like a meteorite out of a cloudless sky, our very own qibla, our inscrutable Black Stone. That the first surviving Western poetry, born within a generation or two of the alphabet, should also be so well-achieved is astonishing. There is nothing tentative about the opening books of the Iliad or the Odyssey, no indication that these are ...”

“... usually serial, preferably home grown. British true crime tends to be about British killers – Ian Brady (See No Evil), John Christie (Rillington Place), the Wests (Fred and Rose), Dennis Nilsen (Des), Jeremy Bamber (White House Farm), Harold Shipman (Doctor Death) – while American true crime favours American atrocities. I don’t see my preference for ...”

“... the expulsion. Why did an overwhelming majority of current or former residents in Uganda, brown or black, feel this way?The answer, I learned, is that what happened in 1972 was the culmination of a process that had started a few years earlier, when many Ugandan Asians were disenfranchised both by British and Ugandan law. At that time, they had been a presence ...”

“... gives a fuck who killed Roger Ackroyd?’ Raymond, attempting in The Hidden Files to define the ‘black novel’ in which he specialised, glossed the Jamesian school as ‘pretentious escapist crap for the well-heeled middle-class market’. A conventional put-down by a man distancing himself, quite reasonably, from his disadvantaged background as an old ...”

“... the three minutes came to an end as the lights faded dramatically in the entire theatre to pitch black. Anne and I were crying so much we couldn’t find our way off the stage, so that when the lights came back up we were still there, arms outstretched, banging into the furniture, wailing like Russian women around a grave. So Rupert has no respect for the ...”

“... a turnip – there is an echo here of Wyndham Lewis’s appraisal of her ‘prose-song … a cold, black suet-pudding … Cut it at any point, it is the same thing … all fat, without nerve’ – but also a literary aristocrat, an ‘aesthetician’ of ‘Methuselah prodigiousness’, ‘dandyish in her handsome wools and velvety in her sentences’ because ...”

“... about the battle-readiness of the National Coal Board and the flakiness of its imported chief, Ian MacGregor, she resisted the impulse to take charge. She allowed herself to be persuaded by her cabinet secretary, Robin Butler, that it was too dangerous for the prime minister’s office to appear to be setting the terms of the dispute. She remained reliant ...”

“... had been bedevilled by some 19,000 US Army deserters involved in large-scale robbery and black market dealings in the rear areas.’ One group syphoned off petrol needed for tanks and sold it on the French black market. Whiting’s italics and exclamation-mark seem amply justified when he reports that from February ...”

“... of Memoirs of a Revolutionist, was a paragraph which put the case very deftly (the reviewer was Ian Watt, author of The Rise of the Novel): Macdonald has genuine analytic power, but he is perhaps best as a satirist; with his quick allergy to cant he in many ways resembles Mencken, and has traces of the latter’s tendency to view the spectacle of human ...”

“... though initially implausible, is brought to a successful, hazy yet blunt erotic conclusion: Black-eyed susans, daisy fleabane, chicory, goldenrod, butter-and-eggs each flower of which was like a tiny dancer leaping, legs together, scudded past the tractor wheels. Stretched scatterings of flowers moved in a piece, like the heavens, constellated by my ...”

“... Marius takes the story. His last pages relate to the late 1520s and are full of darkness and black depression, proleptic of an end which was still twenty years off. This is a pity. As the excellent Australian scholar Ian Siggins has shown, Old Man Luther is just as interesting a subject as Erikson’s Young Man ...”