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“... Steve McQueen​ trained as a painter before turning to video art. His early films were silent, monochrome, focusing on his own body because it was cheaper than hiring an actor. Many of the works in his retrospective at Tate Modern (which won’t reopen when the museum does later this month because it doesn’t meet ‘museum regulations for social distancing in enclosed spaces’) are shot with the camera held so close that at times you couldn’t slide a cigarette paper between McQueen’s lens and his subject ...”

“... One​ of the peace walls near the Falls Road in Belfast is decorated with a mural featuring several famous figures – among them, Nelson Mandela, Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King. At its centre, though, five times the size of the others, is a stern-looking man with bushy, neatly parted grey hair, wearing a frock-coat and necktie. Two hundred years after his birth into slavery, Frederick Douglass, the abolitionist and writer once described as ‘an ornament to society and a blessing to his race’, looms munificently over the city he visited during a speaking tour of Ireland in 1845 ...”

“... of the 1920s against ‘coloured seamen’. A Mass Observation survey on race in 1939, cited by Colin Grant in Homecoming, recorded a range of hostile comments. ‘One cannot compare them with whites,’ one woman said. ‘Having been brought up in a hot country they should be left there.’ Another thought of them as ‘big religious children’. ‘I ...”

“... decades ago disappeared, or has it merely become less visible, less garish? A Smell of Burning, Colin Grant’s fourth book (he has also written about reggae and about Marcus Garvey), is preoccupied by questions of stigma – haunted by them, even. The book is a hybrid of memoir, medical history and social history of a kind that has become familiar in ...”

“... Norman Briggs, is informed by James Anderton that Stalker is under investigation, and that Colin Sampson, Chief Constable of West Yorkshire, is to take Stalker’s place on the RUC inquiry. Two days later, Briggs announces publicly that he has asked Sampson to conduct an investigation into a ‘disciplinary offence’ that may have been committed by ...”

“... novel of all time’; Penguin recently republished it, along with two of Tey’s other Inspector Grant novels, in a handsome new edition with an introduction by Alexander McCall Smith. It’s an odd sort of crime novel, because there isn’t really a crime. Detective Inspector Alan Grant of Scotland Yard is laid up in ...”

“... Devolution allowed the Scots to make their own democratic decisions about how to spend their block grant from Westminster. Now the scale and indeed the existence of the block grant itself are open to question. Scotophobia, which last featured as a significant political force in the agitations of the 1760s against the ...”

“... themselves of their father’s anger and self-pity (‘O God, O God, O God, have pity on me and grant me patience’). McGahern found books in the shambolic farmhouse of the Protestant Moroneys, who, in between picking bees out of their beards, gave him freedom to range in their library. His success at school finally won grudging concessions from his ...”

“... 36: ‘My kingdom is not of this world.’ Hoadly understood this to mean that Christ had made no grant of temporal ‘dominion’ to his disciples ‘over the faith and religious conduct of others of his subjects’, concluding that the Church possessed no divine mandate to support establishments or to impose on people’s consciences. Indeed, these were ...”

“... sons and their wives. Similarly, Anderson’s pseudo-historical concern with King Athelstan’s grant of a charter to the Craft meshed with the current cult of an ancient Anglo-Saxon constitution. However, as Anderson’s career indicates, the rise of Freemasonry was far from confined to England. The Craft provides a fascinating sub-plot to Linda Colley’s ...”

“... spite of the emergence of a prosperous black middle class with Republican role models in Rice and Colin Powell, the historic connection between blacks and Republicans has been severed: in 2000 barely one in ten of the black electorate backed Bush. The Democrat passage of Civil Rights legislation in the 1960s alienated white Southern Democrat voters from their ...”

“... Bai Xing, ‘Old Hundred Names’; the shortage of surnames bespeaks a passion for anonymity. When Colin Thubron began his recent travels, he feared that he might not make contact with the individual at all, and when Behind the Wall was published, he spoke of ‘the strange kind of delight’ the traveller feels when the Chinese behave in a way he can ...”

“... tolerance of our ‘natural beliefs’ and his radical scepticism. It is really not consistent to grant us permission to believe what we naturally do believe and at the same time insist that we do not know any of the things we commonly take ourselves to know, since one cannot consistently continue to believe what one believes one cannot know. To believe is to ...”

“... a result which none of us would have foreseen. The third survey, Block and White Britain by Colin Brown, was published recently, the bulk of the fieldwork having been done in 1981/82. The author sees his main task as providing a factual base for discussion and understanding, and he is concerned to explain the methods which he followed in composing his ...”

“... occupied between 1930 and 1960 – also, it may be, under the influence of Wittgenstein!). Colin McGinn’s admirable book manages to give a comprehensive picture of the state of play in the subject at the present time. In a compressed and well-written work, and without any loss of subtlety, he contrives to lead the reader on a guided tour of the ...”