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“... cricketers were, how much everything was tilted against them and, at the same time, how good white South African cricket was. Take the schoolboy generation I saw rising around me. Playing against Hilton College, I came up against Hylton Ackerman and Mike Procter – the latter opening both the batting and bowling at the age of 13 – while at Durban High ...”

“... Panthers. Soul music was coming into its own. Ray Charles was recording for Atlantic Records; Sam Cooke had left the Soul Stirrers; James Brown was touring with his Famous Flames. But Otis Redding wasn’t a soul singer yet. Billed as Otis ‘Rockin’ Redding or ‘Rockhouse Redding’, he sang rock and roll and remained heavily indebted to Little ...”

“... On Valentine’s Day​ 1661 Elizabeth Pepys and her husband, Sam, rose early and walked from their house behind the Tower of London down Seething Lane. They were to visit one of Sam’s superiors, William Batten, surveyor of the navy. The custom was that women should take the first man they saw as their Valentine, so long as he was no relation ...”

“... of pendent worms as long as my hand, as thick as a child’s finger, of a slightly pinkish white, and set as close as three or four to the square inch’. The very rock on which paradise rested was, he realised ‘part alive, part putrescent’ It was confirmation of what he already knew. When he went for the first time to Provence the light entranced ...”

“... treacherous gloom. How quickly, without noticing, one ran from one to the other, after the proud White Rabbit, a well-known Old Harrovian porn star with a sphincter that winked as bells rang, crowds murmured and pigeons flopped about the dormer window while Nick woke and turned in his own little room again, in the comfortable anticlimax of home. This is ...”

“... respect it is an unfortunate title, suggesting an item from the cast-list of almost any black-and-white film about almost any celebrity, but in the respect that it makes a point of Rebecca West’s youth, it is a good title. The first article is signed by her natural name, Cicily Fairfield: she was so young that she had not yet yielded to whatever weakness it ...”

“... in the gloomy Dakota Building; later, we were to have our conversations in her charming all-white drawing-room – in one of several apartments she maintained on higher floors of the Dakota – frequently lunching off an exclusive and unlimited diet of caviar of the finest quality. Unhappily, from my point of view, the literary project enjoyed no such ...”

“... nor his friends readier for bold adventure on a Saturday free of school than all did in the ‘white town drowsing’ on the Missouri shore of the mighty Mississippi River where Mark Twain in the 1840s drank deeply of the sweetness of life, and never forgot it. ‘Free’ was a word of powerful attraction for Twain. His friend Tom Blankenship enjoyed a ...”

“... this were to be the last of the funhouse novels I doubt if anyone would complain very much. Edmund White, Garrison Keillor and Bobbie Ann Mason belong to the generation of American writers born during the Second World War. White’s Caracole is set in an imaginary country, part European and part Third World, in the midst of ...”

“... then pulls the ladder up behind him.             ‘The Truest Sport: Jousting with Sam and Charlie’ It is entirely possible that in the long run historians will regard the entire New Left experience as not so much a political as a religious episode wrapped in semi-military gear and guerrilla ...”

“... There is a painter in Henry James’s Roderick Hudson called Sam Singleton: ‘He painted small landscapes, mainly in watercolours . . . improvement had come hand in hand with patient industry.’ His appearance (he is a small plain man), his regular working hours and his modest equanimity (he has a tendency to blush) are a foil to Roderick’s good looks and labile temperament ...”

“... versions. In ‘Sleeping Bear Lament’, a college kid at the beach remembers the disappearance of Sam, a misfit and loner, in the same shifting sands he’s sitting on now. Rondo, one of the crowd, takes a momentary break from the entertainment to pass out behind a sand-dune. His friends lose him and panic. He comes back; ...”

“... The wild​ , dark and very funny novels of Sam Lipsyte are governed by a certain fatalism: a nominal meritocracy produces a class of super-qualified and clever people who are nevertheless shut out of society’s higher-status zones. The world is split between sellouts and burnouts – guess who takes the lion’s share? ‘Let me stand on the rooftop of my reckoning,’ says Lewis ‘Teabag’ Miner, the narrator of Lipsyte’s second novel, Home Land (2004), ‘and shout naught but the indisputable: I did not pan out ...”

“... sixty-five minutes of the film’s running time (my own informal measure, by wristwatch). His white skin is thoroughly on view. No, it’s the pre-existing backdrop of Superman and Batman’s deep whiteness that establishes Spider-Man’s metaphoric blackness. Clark Kent and Bruce Wayne live in palaces of privilege and operate from fantasy ...”

“... 20th-century European competitors. North Carolina required not only separate schools for black and white children but segregation of textbooks (‘Books shall not be interchangeable between the white and coloured schools, but shall continue to be used by the race first using them’). It is an ambitious project, an attempt ...”