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“... of Arabic,’ Ahmad says to the owner, grinning conspiratorially at us. ‘Speak Arabic with Pak Michael, go on! He speaks Arabic. Go on! With a beard like that in Yemen you’d perfume it; here you mothball it to get rid of the cockroaches!’ So much for the sacred beard, a sign of piety with the Prophet’s beard the exemplar. It is distinctively Arab ...”

“... afternoon on which four white men are standing trial in a city courthouse accused of depriving a black man of his civil rights, especially the right not to be batoned following traffic violations. The sheriff’s car with which I have been making tender eye-contact in the rear-view mirror seems to have turned off, somewhere on Compton or Alondra. I’m now ...”

“... from Rio’s favelas and using them for pornographic photo shoots and movies. He showed me two black and white photographs which had been downloaded from the internet. One was of an eight-year-old girl being raped; the other was of a baby less than a year old covered in semen. ‘This material is spreading like lightning over the web,’ he said, ‘but ...”

“... one another in their childhood also insulated him against Eurocentrism: believing that ‘black, white and yellow people are fond of just the same kind of adventures,’ he introduced his readers to Chinese, Japanese and Arabic tales.Censorious colleagues at the Folklore Society said Lang had jumbled up genuinely ancient tales with the work of ...”

“... hoot (which he is, the funniest thing until, well, Lowry)? Under the Volcano eats light like a black hole. It is a work of such gravity and connectedness and spectroscopic richness that it is more world than product. It is absolute mass, agglomeration of consciousness and experience and terrific personal grace. It has planetary swagger, it is a planet ...”

“... admired his professionalism and frivolity. More films followed; among them, The bride wore black (1967), Stolen Kisses (1968), The Wild Child (1969), The Story of Adèle H (1975), The Green Room (1978), Finally Sunday (1983). The Letters begin in 1945 and continue to the year of Truffaut’s death. He has some regular correspondents and confidants ...”

“... most eccentric of slices to extract from all that life – a freak blond hair plucked from a jet-black (and horribly unravelling) plait?’ He knows we know the answer. These characters and stories are not less Indian than for whom the claim is made. And the same goes for the stories. The supposed centre that makes them seem marginal, or (later) seeks to ...”

“... about the necessity of class war. The reader is left pondering this resurgence and the strange, black, ugly things that are to ...”

“... were emerging. The heroic image of the Third World was being exchanged for that of the starving black baby in charity advertisements. The Left was in crisis. And there was Islam. The overthrow of the Shah of Iran and all that he had represented in Cold War politics, and the rise of the Khomeinist state, were seen by many as the re-emergence of the ...”

“... as this must increasingly be supplied by technology. The ‘bog, clay and rubble, and the stark black dearth’ that Mr Laurence has had to tread is not beneficial for human nature, and leads to ‘penury, inertness and grimace’. So far as is humanly possible, these volumes are free from errors and omissions, though Mr Laurence invites readers to sent ...”

“... what I’d like to paint – try to imagine that this wall is missing, and instead there is a black abyss and what looks like an audience in a dim theatre, rows and rows of faces, sitting and watching me. And all the faces belong to people whom I know or once knew, and who are now watching my life ... This man with envy; that woman with compassion. There ...”

“... is implied in shots of dancing children, of a grieving father and daughter, was the real hero of black Americans, their promised saviour, King’s death merely a corroboration of the great conspiracy against goodness. Almost as monstrous is the film’s use of Robert Kennedy’s assassination as a mere item in Garrison’s self-vindication and patched-up ...”

“... the first anniversary, he began to wonder, to his horror, about her eyes: Were they brown or black, or grey? Green? Christ, I can’t say ... One spring morning, something gave in him; shouldering his twin grief like a cross, he shut the front door, turned into the street and had walked just ten yards, when, from a dark close, he caught a flash of ...”

“... most of which were ruled by the British or the French. In Liberia the incomers were almost all black and the oligarchy they set up continued to rule the country until two decades after much of the rest of Africa had won its independence. The violent overthrow of the old political order – in 1980 – occurred in the lifetime of many young adults; in ...”

“... in Short Haul Engine, ‘Boyfriend’s Car’. Every word dangerous, every word a specification: Black Nova. Jacked up. Fast. Rhetorical question. Naturally, a girl would choose the adult conspiracy of smoked glass, darkened interiors. Privacy. Its language of moving parts, belts, and unfamiliar fluids. Again, the fast puns, the spaces in the narration, the ...”