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“... I was not myself. I was just anyone.’ The person who says ‘I’ in Michael Hofmann’s earlier poems is uncertain, diffident, angry; he seems both gnarled and youthful, like some hoary child out of Hardy, although rather better treated: Most evenings I was aphasic, incapable of speech, worn down by tolerance and inclusion ...”

“... didn’t do anything, couldn’t do anything, A hero of early vaudeville, of flickering black-and-white Comedies, imperilled by flights of steps, by a windy world. Secret favourite of a minority of the childish electorate, He was the butler in tails, teetering on the brink of the pool, Shivering on his flippers, swishing his wings. His performance Faultlessly ...”

“... workers opposite very evidently pissing behind milk-glass, goslings and baby coots without the white stripe as yet, attack dogs defecating on the grass, the occasional putter of narrowboats, industrial and bucolic as canals are industrial and bucolic, the velvet curtains slowly turning to dust on the woodwormed rail, my diminished establishment of ...”

“... lured down a large hole in the ground by a small and familiar (from Tenniel’s illustrations) white rabbit. Much well-known stuff ensues, involving falling and doors and eating and drinking and shrinking and growing, and for a while we may think this is a film of Alice in Wonderland after all. But only until she gets through one of the doors. Once through ...”

“... memorable in the movie has to do with this head-on approach. The colours shift into near black-and-white, or into faded, altered versions of shades we think we know. Figures vanish into a fog, only bent silhouettes remaining, as if they were slim relics of a Henry Moore exhibition. The screen goes dark. The screen goes ...”

“... for whom the papers presume to speak turn out, on inspection, to be some fraction or other of the white ‘talking classes’, each ‘we’ is an imperialist, asserting its claim to be taken as the universal, the consensual ‘we’. Yet each ‘we’ can only be given an identity by specifying which groups it excludes, and which registers of ...”

“... a moment in the life of a legend: 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 ...”

“... of their minds. My grandfather was heard to remark that it might be possible to join Kolchak’s White Army in Siberia. In the meantime, the boys would be enrolled at St Paul’s School in Hammersmith. When I look at the photographs of my grandparents on their farm in Sussex, it is not until the mid-Twenties, after the definitive defeat of Kolchak and all ...”

“... of Washington in Seattle exchange banalities in a parking lot: ‘Dr Mather!’ said the white man as he approached. ‘Dr Mather, it’s me. It’s Dr Faulkner.’ ‘Good evening, Dr Faulkner. How are you?’ ‘Fine, fine. How was your class?’ ‘Well, I’m having trouble with a student. An Indian student, actually. She is very ...”

“... the war in Vietnam were slow in coming. Saigon fell in 1975, and Hal Ashby’s Coming Home and Michael Cimino’s The Deer Hunter both date from 1978. Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now was 1979. In their separate ways these films were all about damage done to Americans; any damage done to others was incidental, part of some larger story that wasn’t ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... the Blacks, Mexicans and Chinese were using these chemicals, forgetting their place and menacing white people’. This is what a Black character in the movie means when he says: ‘The drug war is just a war on us.’ Hari notes that ‘the contrast between the racism directed at Billie and the compassion offered to addicted ...”

“... disorientating. But the contrast between the immaculate physical setting – with its black or white gallery walls, some curved and some straight, small rooms, long passageways, snug little mezzanine at the end and introspective pebble beach from some Scandi-noir outside – and the derisory and unsightly paintings was troubling. One felt a little pampered ...”

“... In return, you write me Latin tags, stoical philosophy boiled dry. I placed a knife under my white left breast (which you’ve never seen), broke the skin and sent you my heart’s blood on a handkerchief. You always feel sorry for your wife. Think of yourself for a change ... When my body is washed up round the next bend in the river, will that remind ...”

“... but all that seems to happen in this line is that the agent, Richard Strickland, played by Michael Shannon with fabulously nasty relish, tortures him with a cattle prod – and loses two fingers in the process. The creature is referred to as ‘the asset’, indeed ‘the most sensitive asset’ the facility has entertained, but this is wishful ...”