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“... to fit into the timeframe defined by a single year. History rarely can. That is the problem with Christian Caryl’s fascinating and frustrating book, which identifies 1979 as the year that gave birth to the 21st century. Caryl builds his case around five overlapping stories, four about individuals and one about a ...”

“... one capable of coping with the latest, bewilderingly fractured products of Post-Modernism. As Caryl Emerson remarks, this idea, ordinarily associated with figures such as Terry Eagleton and Fredric Jameson, could hardly be explained to her Russian colleagues at various Bakhtin conferences and colloquia. They simply could not comprehend that ‘the debased ...”

“... sticks to him), is shown to be the soundest of them, if a little fey and very smelly. The Christian symbolism of the fish is noted in a jocular aside of Reg’s – which both defuses and reinforces it. Burgess chooses locations for his novel which ensure high production values. Any Old Iron has a cinematic feel which becomes explicit when a ...”

“... staunch Presbyterianism’ and someone else was ‘a very private person with a profound belief in Christian values and the family as the basis of civilised life’. But this is not to say that there is any general reluctance to tick off the dead. Dick Emery was ‘a talent sadly unfulfilled’, George Brown’s career was ‘hampered’ by ‘his explosive ...”

“... extraordinary travels and his eventual aspirations as a free man – which range from being a good Christian to learning the French horn. Equiano stayed with the godly and genteel Guerin sisters in Greenwich, and took ‘many opportunities of seeing London, which I desired of all things’. He tried training as a hairdresser in the Haymarket, he went to ...”

“... account is the most significant of the many passages from the literature of slavery that Caryl Phillips recycles in his novel Cambridge (1991). Inventing a backstory, he decided that Cambridge had been married to Christiana, and that his feelings towards her, if vindictive at all, were stirred up by Brown, who, in a repulsive episode reported by ...”

“... are ‘scaling Engines’ a somewhat modern intrusion, but the whole passage has become a kind of Christian miracle, in which a ‘rising Host appears’ and ‘spears’ (now visibly ‘glitt’ring’ rather than ‘edged’) become a ‘Wood’. Even a stone used as a weapon gains different significance from the moral tone of Pope’s ...”