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“... Django. ‘The D is silent,’ as Jamie Foxx says to a sneering white man who wonders if this black fellow knows how to spell his name. Then we see two slave-drivers on horseback herding a small group of shackled men across the rocks and into a forest. It’s getting cold, the men have thin blankets, their breath freezes in the air. The procession pauses ...”

“... if that myth has become entrenched in the wake of last year’s 50th-anniversary celebrations. Black people had lived here for years: in addition to the long-established communities in Liverpool and Cardiff, thousands of Caribbean men and women had served in the RAF and worked as technicians and electricians in factories in the North-West during World War ...”

“... words​ , reminiscent of W.E.B. Du Bois’s ‘double consciousness’, come from Theodor Wonja Michael’s autobiography, Deutsch sein und Schwarz dazu: Erinnerungen eines Afro-Deutschen (2013), translated into English as Black German: An Afro-German Life in the 20th Century. Born in Berlin in 1925, ...”

“... Racism in June 1980. It is a portrait of the society we live in, as it presents itself to its black citizens; and it is a horrifying portrait. Though its author, who teaches at Thames Polytechnic, has hopefully entitled it Now you do know, he expresses in his Preface pessimism about whether many white people in Britain will read it, or will believe it if ...”

“... across the street, one thumb in the back pocket of his trousers. He has armoured teeth and a black headscarf. He is what a certain person recently called a bad hombre, but genial with it, no stress. His name in the movie is Juan, he’s from Cuba but sounds entirely North American. His turf is part of Liberty City, Miami, a so-called ...”

“... in Scorsese’s The Irishman (2019). Though the obvious does occasionally have to be explained. As Michael Corleone says in The Godfather Part II, ‘if history has taught us anything, it is that you can kill anyone.’ It’s an accident, of course, that another Corleone is played by Robert De Niro, the first of the ludicrously quarrelling men in Killers of ...”

“... In a way Ross is teaching us photography as much as he is letting us look at a part of the Black South. Teaching us film as photography, that is, or photography as film, and the work’s most memorable moments, its chief credits, let’s say, are divided between sightings of what the camera can do and long glimpses of what a camera allows us to see ...”

“... man in a position made impossible by historical developments, one will not find much in either Michael Leapman’s sympathetic and readable portrait, or John Cole’s lively and good-humoured canter over the events of the last decade, to change one’s mind. The nature of the Labour Party’s – and Kinnock’s – problem was vividly illustrated by what ...”

“... are tallish, more like middle-aged, and Finney’s hair in particular looks like a terminally oily black carpet. They all have moustaches with an old-fashioned twirl, but we had to wait for Branagh for the real, baroque thing. His moustache stretches out wide beyond the mouth, a luxuriant, greying affair that resembles a facial ferret, and then continues ...”

“... concert Cooke once gave in Boston. The sound system didn’t work, but Cooke persuaded the largely black audience to create a rhythmic accompaniment of stamping and clapping, and to sing along with ‘Chain Gang’. It’s not clear that his refusal to admit defeat then could have had any equivalent at the Copacabana, and this is what Malcolm is pointing ...”

“... The residents at the motel have a discussion about race and how white people routinely subjugate black people. This seems sound enough until one black person pulls out a gun and shoots another to prove his point. There is shock and horror all around, even after the gun turns out to be a starter pistol and the target alive ...”

“... going to pay? The action of the film really gets going when Monk, furious at the success of other Black writers who do believe in race and exploit every cliché about it to the hilt, decides to hit back at the whole publishing world by writing a fiercely satirical, irredeemably ridiculous version of these supposedly realistic novels, born of true life. There ...”

“... burning only his half of the proceeds. The background to this event is an anecdote-cum-fable that Michael Caine, as the faithful servant Alfred, tells Christian Bale as Bruce Wayne. There was a bandit in Burma, apparently, who stole jewels at will from almost everyone and was never caught – because he didn’t want and didn’t keep the jewels, he just ...”

“... nothing.’ The suggestion is that nothing is just what an android needs, a mark of real class. Michael Fassbender plays David, the android, with terrific, elegant style, not as if he were Peter O’Toole but as if he liked Peter O’Toole – a fine distinction. His uniform makes him look like a prisoner rather than a servant, and the effect is that of one ...”

“... We know​ what black comedy is but I wonder whether some stories don’t call for another colour. Pale grey, for example, might be about right for Anne Fontaine’s Gemma Bovery (2014), a stately, not obviously funny film in which an English woman stumbles into Flaubert’s plot and dies not deliberately by arsenic poisoning but accidentally by swallowing, or rather failing to swallow, a chunk of baguette ...”