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“... challenged more strongly. The moral reversal – natives behaving properly while being betrayed by white men who violated their own codes of the sea – impressed the inquiry and, no doubt, the devourers of the now fast travelling news between Aden and London and Singapore. This was the scandal that inspired Conrad, who had landed in Singapore in 1883 after ...”

“... more bleakly precise about the needs and wants that draw the fugitive and lonely together – a white girl and black boy in ‘Black Boy’, an overlooked wife and an inventive, operatic Baron in ‘Friend of the Family’. ‘Keep your pity,’ warns the title of a grotesque story of misplaced charity towards a vicious elderly couple. The majority of these ...”

“... Horace and Ovid threw down the gauntlet to oblivion: come and get me if you can. Paul Farley and Michael Symmons Roberts are poets and professors of poetry, and the authors of a previous collaboration, Edgelands, which took as its subject the dejected spaces that buffer suburban developments, industrial parks, highways and airports. They have now teamed up ...”

“... recall these years through veils of mist and shades of grey, conjuring images of black and white photography or newsreel.’ Do they? People, I suspect, have been so often told that this was the palette attached to that decade and a half that they unquestioningly accept it. It is an old chromatic cliché. Edward VI’s coat of arms is twice displayed ...”

“... limited to a small but dedicated following among writers such as Richard Ford, Stewart O’Nan and Michael Chabon. This came ten years too late for Yates, who died of emphysema and complications following minor surgery in 1992. His fiction is closely modelled on his own experiences and, perhaps unsurprisingly, it is a miserable place. The Easter Parade ...”

“... denigrated A Walk on the Wild Side, he was brought near to suicide by the reviews. Always drawn to white male redemption through black love, Algren had originally called Golden Arm by the title Beauvoir used in their correspondence, ‘The Dealer and the High Yellow’. He had succumbed to the publisher’s pressure and made the prostitute Molly-O a ...”

“... shared a building with National Lampoon. Kincaid struck up a conversation with one of its writers, Michael O’Donoghue, who suggested she meet his friend George Trow, a staff writer at the New Yorker. Trow organised a lunch with Kincaid and William Shawn, then editor of the New Yorker, at the Algonquin. Kincaid ordered the most expensive item on the menu ...”

“... she was sent, as if to complete the gothic theme, to the same awful convent school that Antonia White attended and wrote about in Frost in May. Vicious nuns, a minimal education for middle-class marriage and – something, at least – a powerful enemy to kick against. As an adult she would spit on the street if she saw nuns. Earlier, she had a more ...”

“... 95 picketers were charged with riot, which at the time carried a life sentence. At their trial, Michael Mansfield’s cross-examination of the assistant chief constable of South Yorkshire, Anthony Clement, revealed the existence of the Public Order Manual. The judge ordered some pages to be released, containing ‘questionable tactics, involving the use of ...”

“... class that had given way to an Irish American bootlegging dynasty and affiliated ethnic pols like Michael Dukakis and Paul Tsongas. Romney lived in a mansion in Belmont, a town between Cambridge and Walden Pond with nothing but mansions; in the era of NWA I recall another boy being teased for being ‘straight outta Belmont’. In our imaginations, it was the ...”

“... the black borders of the US. Jaune Quick-To-See Smith’s crafty layering in Fifty Shades of White echoes the creation of this elaborate fiction, a fiction that continues to exercise an extraordinary, destructive power. I am reminded of the first maps I saw as a child, hanging on the walls of British classrooms. Of course, the colour that occurred most ...”

“... qu’instable’. He is describing homosexuals, whom he calls ‘inverts’, and to Edmund White’s analysis of this passage in The Proust Project – White sees Proust’s writing on homosexuality as both ‘venomous’ in certain of its assumptions and productive in the sheer array of its contradictions – we ...”

“... not wholly had. There would have been no ‘Recessional’ but for its members’ insistence that white men should not boast. Kipling’s most serious difficulty did not come to light during the years covered by these volumes. He depended on encountering the incidents which would one day bring his Daemon into play. Once these had been absorbed, they might lie ...”

“... a pleasant sitting-room with chintzy chairs, into another room at the back. It has a black-and-white checked floor and is full of easels. At each easel there is an old woman, wearing a smock. Some have paintbrushes in their hands and are managing to dip them occasionally into paint and splodge on the paper in front of them. Such a passage would be equally ...”

“... that go astray or are misunderstood. But for all this, Kate never ceases to be a 57-year-old white North Carolina woman, with all her limitations and prejudices, her nostalgia for a pre-consumerist America and her well-meaning but patronising attitude to blacks. In the last fifty pages, which briefly recount Kate’s adult life, the language turns blowsy ...”