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“... prepared with a burnt umber ground. The painter first attacked it, as far as I can see, with a black-loaded brush, dragging a jagged stuttery line almost from top to bottom. That was to be the rock edge of Etna’s crater. Where the volcanic glow was to fall, Rosa slapped on a queasy mid-tone mix of sienna and smalt blue; capped it with brisk blurts of ...”

“... am not heart-broken. I have attended several opening ceremonies. On the flight, my brother-in-law, Michael Slater (Michael Pasternak, according to his ticket) is unable to read because the Aeroflot jumbo doesn’t have individual seat lights. He has the aisle seat – exiled to inner darkness. Speaking of darkness, what a ...”

“... the blood of all his descendants with mysterious properties, so that in 1883 William George Black recorded that Dubliners regarded Keogh blood as a proven remedy for the toothache, while an acquaintance claimed to know of a Belfast Keogh ‘whose flesh had actually been punctured scores of times to procure his blood’. ...”

“... piece of memoir Smith wrote for the New Yorker about Christine, the other ‘female viola-playing black nerd’ in the Brent Youth Orchestra, she describes her friend as ‘one of the many people to whom I am always surreptitiously apologising for my obscene luck. Why do I have money when so many of my friends and family – all of whom work harder than I ...”

“... How does​ Shakespeare look, after #MeToo and Black Lives Matter? Scenes of sexual coercion, from Richard III to Pericles, have become more immediate. In Measure for Measure, Isabella’s predicament – should she agree to sleep with Angelo, corrupt deputy to the Duke of Vienna, in order to save her brother from execution? – gets audiences on her side ...”

“... But yellow and green were there too, as Van Gogh noted, and orange and red; oh, and blue and black. The tops were taken off all the tubes, and colour seemed to get its freedom and intensity back: richnesses that had been suppressed – either by self-censorship or academic dictate – since the days of Delacroix. No one did colour more blatantly and more ...”

“... On 5 October 1990, Britain entered the ERM: on 16 September 1992, ‘Black Wednesday’, Britain left the ERM. These two events and the years between them were crucial in recent British politics. They are the source of the divisions in the contemporary Tory Party and all the leading participants are obliged to state and restate what they said and did then in much the same way that the members of an earlier Tory generation had to spell out the position they’d taken over Munich ...”

“... what I yearned for was truth.’Enninful took the top job at Vogue in 2017 and became the first black editor in the magazine’s history. Ending the overwhelming whiteness on its pages was central to his pitch: ‘We would not be exclusive and proscriptive,’ he writes, ‘but inclusive, on every page … Diversity and inclusivity were at the forefront of ...”

“... of the gallant South’, as Billie Holiday might have described it, was open to anyone who hated black people and Jews, from members of the Ku Klux Klan to neo-Nazis. Emboldened by having an ally in the highest office in the land, they came with Confederate flags, swastikas, medieval-looking wooden shields, torches and, of course, guns. They came to ...”

“... the bold lettering VENEREAL DISEASES, a colleague came to the desk and Charles shut the directory. Michael said, ‘Have you spoken to anyone here this morning yet?’ ‘No.’ Michael was American, too. They worked in an American investment company. ‘No one’s told you about Harold Cripps?’ ‘No.’ ...”

“... minorities – no Jews, no Poles, no Italians – and had nominated only one other, the hapless Michael Dukakis. But this was the response of a baby boomer, when in fact one of the remarkable things about the Obama campaign was that it wasn’t about race at all. Obama, though he studiously copied his speaking style from King and other preachers, was not ...”

“... and hold out a tiny metal tray onto which fell the coins he could empty into the pockets of his black jacket without having the skin on his hands participate in the joy and humiliation. Sometimes showing a yellowed concert programme, worn out in the folds, hard to unfold, with his still-recognisable photo on it, with the word Wien underlined in red by ...”

“... the 1960s like for you?’ ‘I didn’t even know they were the 1960s.’ Is Sunset Boulevard a black comedy? ‘No. Just a picture.’ ‘What’s the difference between “inspired by” and a “remake”?’ ‘“Inspired by” means no credit.’ Has he mellowed? ‘I see fewer people now. That’s the way I have mellowed.’ Telling (once again) the ...”

“... and on his thumb.He has scraped the scales, the principal beauty,from unnumbered fish with that black old knife,the blade of which is almost worn away.If he was in a 19th-century painting, he would have had some splendid allegorical or mythological label, but here he’s just a quiet and slightly sad man (the phrases seem to proceed, too, in short hacking ...”

“... Mengin’s ghastly-glorious 1877 painting of the poet, bare-breasted beneath a swirling black sky, gazing mournfully down at the Aegean.) Watching Prins make this particular plunge, Post-Modern tresses lifting in the wind, is to be struck again by how difficult it is, in life or literary criticism, to avoid the classic Sapphic double-bind: take the ...”