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“... Ike Eze-anyika’s Canteen Culture, which won the 1998 Saga Prize ‘for the best first novel by a black British or Irish writer’, is a fictional exposé of the Met (‘the arsehole of the Civil Service’) and an episodic comedy caper. Team I of Northwick police station – Bubba, Lionel, Speedy, Sponge, moustachioed Saddam and Jazz (who’s ...”

“... Amphitryon set in a parallel universe, introduces a line from Nietzsche.) As ‘Benjamin Black’, though, he’s shown himself willing to turn out workmanlike crime stories, and some of his best non-Black novels – among them The Book of Evidence (1989) and The Untouchable (1997) – add sinister plot elements to ...”

“... ago by observing a little stroke, and I can confirm that hearing is the last sense to go before black-out. A certain self-distancing curiosity about medical, clerical, liturgical and psychological issues to do with death management doubtless has roots deeper than I care to explore, but my late father used to make a point of reading Jeremy Taylor’s ‘Holy ...”

“... Christopher, the new Columbus, is conceived on a beach at Acapulco at the beginning of 1992. Mexico’s overseas debt stands at $1492 billion, soon to rise to $1992 billion, and the Yucatan peninsula has been ceded to the Club Mediterranée in the vain hope of paying the interest. The population of Mexico, or Makesicko, City has reached thirty million human beings and four times as many rats ...”

“... with Roy Cohn in the Plaza Hotel in 1958, the Director of the FBI was allegedly wearing a fluffy black dress, very fluffy, with flounces, and lace stockings and high heels, and a black curly wig. He had make-up on, and false eyelashes. It was a very short skirt, and he was sitting there in the living room of the suite with ...”

“... I have heard great argument about it and about, from reminiscences of the Trotsky assassination to Christopher Hill’s recall of the Papal incitement against Gloriana, but evermore came out by the same door as in I went. The Salman Rushdie case has no analogue and no precedent. Once that is established, it is fair to ask how it could have, considering the ...”

“... helpings of Austen, George Eliot and the redoubtable Brontë sisters. There were a whole lot of black and white New Directions paperbacks, mostly poetry by people like H.D. or Denise Levertov. There were the Colette novels she read on the sly. There was the first edition of Couples, belonging to her mother, which Madeleine had surreptitiously dipped into ...”

“... I pulled the gloves as tight as I could. Outside the village all the countryside was frozen snow. Black skeletal trees were dotted around it. Along our track were a series of bare thorns. The sky was darkening all the time, with skeins and clusters of stars springing out across it, and the light wind carried flecks of ice. Half an hour outside the village we ...”

“... illness. Until recently, aside from a pioneering selection of stories assembled by the translator Christopher Middleton in 1982, his work has barely been available in English. But now, thanks to a steady accumulation of volumes from New York Review Books, and a gifted group of translators willing to wrestle with the often fiendish difficulties of his strange ...”

“... Stanton.) Most of the novel’s reviewers have acknowledged its excellence. In the New Yorker, Christopher Buckley (himself a suspect) called Primary Colors ‘an absolutely dazzling book, the best political novel in many years’. In Newsweek, Walter Shapiro found it ‘the best aide’s-eye view of politics since Robert Penn Warren’s All the King’s ...”

“... of their best encapsulations:     The very concept of a war on drugs became meaningless with Black Eagle and Supermarket, the CIA operations whereby weapons were secretly supplied to the contras in contravention of congressional strictures. In Black Eagle, Israeli stocks of captured PLO weapons were moved from Texas to ...”

“... Wodehouse once spoke well of a Tom Sharpe effort, ‘that The Master should commend such bawdy black humour is superficially surprising, given his dislike for anything raunchy, but he must have appreciated that he had met another comic master who could also make the language dance to his bidding.’ Well, I mean to say, really. This dance business seems to ...”

“... played by MacLachlan, to take his place in the otherworld on the real Cooper’s release. So the black-eyed, mahogany-tanned Evil Cooper got to carry on with his sinister activities, while the genuine item, near-catatonic, shuffled into Dougie’s place, where he stayed for the next 13 episodes. Meanwhile an FBI taskforce, headed by Cole, looked into some ...”

“... breaking into pidgin English. He turns up in Dakar in a shirt bearing the legend i am proud of my black heritage, although he doesn’t have any. And he knows a lot of useless or wrong information, most of it gleaned from the Internet. Will likes to express himself through slapstick: ‘I hung up the phone, jubilant, and threw myself into a wall, then ...”

“... on politics (the object of Michael’s affections complains that he’s ‘too dogmatic’, too ‘black and white’), while the tragi-farcical ending collapses the different levels of reality in a surprising and effective way. In The House of Sleep, on the other hand, a kinky, right-wing mad scientist rubs shoulders with more plausible cast members for no ...”