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“... me. The national grid has left me out. For power I catch wind. In my garden clear water rises. Grace Nichols calls her new book Lazy Thoughts of a Lazy Woman. Or rather, she calls it Lazy Thoughts of a Lazy Woman, and Other Poems – which is odd, since there isn’t a poem in the collection called ‘Lazy Thoughts of a Lazy ...”

“... of smashed lives, rubble, debris, unopened parachutes and emptied and discarded duty-free bottles. Grace Nichols’s Whole of a Morning Sky is a very much more straightforward portrayal of a disoriented childhood. The setting is the former colony of British Guiana during the early 1960s, during the run-up to independence. The forces of disintegration ...”

“... Geneva, Cape Town, Ibadan, Lagos and of course, London/he would do it, yes, he would do it/by the grace of God.’ His dreams disintegrate in the space between the end of one chapter and the beginning of the next, as Evaristo’s repetition of the same phrase across the chapter break shows the limits of its power: he would do it, yes, he would do it by the ...”

“... tropical scenery and soundscape appears in several of her compatriots’ work, in the poetry of Grace Nichols and David Dabydeen, and, especially, in the fiction of Wilson Harris. (I once invited Harris, a long-time resident of Chelmsford, to talk about what it was like to live in Essex: he wrote back to say that he had no idea – his mind was always ...”

“... with explicitly by other writers: Douglas Dunn, Tony Harrison, Linton Kwesi Johnson, John Agard, Grace Nichols and Tom Leonard, to name a few. For some, ‘literary art’ is a territory to be attained (Harrison’s ‘we’ll occupy/ your lousy leasehold, poetry’), in others a rule-book to be torn up (Agard’s ‘mugging de Queen’s English’), in ...”

“... the poetry of Walcott or, closer to home, James Berry (Okri might also learn a thing or two from Grace Nichols). It may be that Okri wishes, as a poet and novelist, to define himself against these older generations, but he is not yet a strong enough poet to spurn their lessons. Colin Falck’s Memorabilia ranges over ...”

“... Church. He was very good as Father Brown.’ The other Alec (McCowen) has arrived at his state of grace after a year or two reading the Gospel of St Mark to hugely appreciative audiences in theatres rather than churches. In Personal Mark he writes about the life of Jesus, as seen through his own and St Mark’s eyes. He thinks that St Mark’s primary source ...”

“... lots of important and interesting people: Penelope Gilliatt, Lillian Hellman, Isaiah Berlin, Mike Nichols and Elaine May, Harry Levin, W.H. Auden, Malraux, James Baldwin, Stravinsky, Robert Lowell etc. None of these people, however, furnishes Wilson with anything like a satisfying number of thoughtful passages in the journals. This is partly a result of ...”

“... identified with God, whose short-term impositions of suffering are offset by his amazing ultimate grace. Later readers generally responded to the tale not by allegorising away its unstated motives and emotions but by elaborating them. Samuel Richardson’s Pamela, and indeed all the explorations of the inner lives of suffering low-born heroines which were the ...”

“... In​ 2015, the novelist Catherine Nichols sent the opening pages of the book she was working on to fifty literary agents. She got so little response she decided to shift gender and try as ‘George’ instead. The difference amazed her. ‘A third of the agents who saw his query wanted to see more, where my numbers never did shift from one in 25 ...”

“... of the few accounts of women’s lives in which that notion feels utterly foreign is the work of Grace Paley, where the typewriter sits on the kitchen table and single mothers do their political organising at the playground. You don’t have a story, Paley warned her writing students, if you’ve left out ‘money and blood’, i.e. how your people make ...”

“... because it was so rare – was prepared to stick up for Wilde at the time of Oscar’s fall from grace. As a youngish and middle-aged man, he devoted hours of his time to the largely unrewarding work of a councillor in the St Pancras Ward of London. Thanks to Shaw, the first ladies’ lavatory in England was constructed at the top of Parkway in Camden ...”

“... and into the body of a woman subjected to owner and overseer. The classic, condensed account is Grace Nichols’s lyric sequence I Is a Long-Memoried Woman (1983). Born and brought up in Guyana, Nichols came to Britain in her late twenties, in 1977, just a few years after full independence, so her book is grounded in ...”

“... of Wilde.’ Phelps touches on this recoil himself, recording Wodehouse’s distaste for Beverly Nichols as an interviewer and quoting a letter from Wodehouse to Bill Townend, saying: ‘Can you imagine giving lunch to celebrate the publication of a book? With the other authors, mostly fairies, twittering all over the place, screaming ...”

“... Of all the Hollywood beauties of her time, only Katharine Hepburn had the grace to be irritating. She was beautiful, but not always, her looks could change from shot to shot. She was oddly elegant, sometimes bouncy, sometimes brittle. She was mocking, brash, hoity-toity. What she never was, in her films, was silent ...”