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“... a secretary with an angry reserve and a nearly crushing sense of her own ignorance, watches Joel Litvinoff, white-toothed and brilliant, an American lawyer with the physical assurance of an athlete and the intellectual assurance of someone who has just been asked to work on Martin Luther King’s legal team. He ...”

“... Sunny and Winston and the other five boys on the programme Graef writes about. Six of the boys are white and three are black; their ages vary from 17 to 20. Johnnie, the first of the boys to be interviewed, is a slim, sallow Irish lad who has no known father and an alcoholic mother. Chloe, his probation officer, reckons it’s ‘conceivable he just might be ...”

“... The Wizard of Oz, appeared everywhere online. While the director (Sidney Lumet) and screenwriter (Joel Schumacher) were both white, the music was mostly written by the Black lyricist and composer Charlie Smalls, and produced by Quincy Jones. It tells a story of Black freedom and resistance through boogie-woogie, disco, funk ...”

“... was amiss when we landed after the flight to find the plane met by British scientists wearing white protective clothing. Our senior officers started asking what the hell was going on. The boffins seemed to know about the danger. Why didn’t we? After the flight, all our flying gear, suits, parachutes and so on, were confiscated and later destroyed. The ...”

“... towers of a city in the distance; then a set of ramshackle houses; a pasture and a farmhouse; the white screen of a drive-in; a field full of oil pumps. A drawling voice, all wide vowels and unclosed consonants, starts to philosophise: ‘The world is full of complainers, and the fact is, nothing comes with a guarantee ... Something can always go wrong ...”

“... I must sell my body.’ Today’s hat will be striped. She holds up the wool for my approval. Joel nudges Iqbal – I see him do it from the corner of my eye. Iqbal’s jotter flies from his hand. It flops heavily to the floor, skims three rows forward and stops dead under Tebogo’s chair. ‘Tebogo,’ I say, ‘could you –’ She simpers in reply ...”

“... Joel Coen’s​ The Tragedy of Macbeth takes its cue from the witches. Or, rather, its one witch, played by Kathryn Hunter, who multiplies herself when she feels like it. Early in the film she stares at us across a pool while talking to Macbeth and Banquo. She is alone but there are two reflections in the water, neither of them in the right place to be hers ...”

“... to the sink, started washing up and as she scraped the golden fleece scourer around a blue and white striped cup, she quit. The resolute non-quitter is Alexis Scott, a chanteuse whose song is ending as she appears in this first paragraph of Patrice Chaplin’s Saraband, a spicy tale of lust and cuisine in London NW1. The book begins splendidly, and it has ...”

“... were established to promote creationism. But it was during Carter’s unhappy term in the White House that Jerry Falwell and others built the national political organisations that were to become the vehicles of the religious right. When Reagan was elected in November 1980, the long exile of evangelicals from Washington had come to an end. It would be ...”

“... climate in South Africa when the Rivonia trial began in November 1963 was so poisonous that Joel Joffe, then a young lawyer, took the case on only because he had already decided to emigrate. Two years later, he wrote up his lively insider’s view of the trial and allowed Lionel Bernstein, the only defendant to get off, to rewrite it to the point of ...”

“... of biography. The key figures are Cecil Rhodes, Barney Barnato, Alfred Beit, J.B. Robinson, Solly Joel and Julius Wernher. None has a definitive biography, and on someone such as Beit there is an almost complete silence. This is even more true of the minor figures, such as Rhodes’s henchman Rutherfoord Harris, his partner Charles Rudd, or even Leander Starr ...”

“... was 18 years old.’ Later in the day, Houston encounters a ‘crew-cut man in his forties with a white towel hitched under his belly and a cigarette clamped between his front teeth’. This is Colonel Sands, a messianic CIA officer and veteran of the Second World War, who drinks too much and takes an unusual and obsessive interest in the tunnels that ...”

“... of its namesake, seems consecrated to the unusual and the mortifying. The current show – Joel-Peter Witkin’s photographs of corpses, amputees and hermaphrodites – holds a grotesqueness sufficient to remind the visitor of how sweet, how antique already, the infamous Mapplethorpe images have become. At least his models were alive. Circumstance has ...”

“... partly a matter of form. Like Diane Arbus and Robert Mapplethorpe, Hujar created square, black and white images, typically using a Rolleiflex or the more sophisticated Hasselblad, plus tripod. The geometry of the square encourages a photographer to centre the subject and face it head on, turning unruly bodies and irregular scenes into fixed primary shapes. But ...”

“... end, even if it is doing so amidst great suffering. But the writing in A Land Apart is largely by white writers and, especially that translated from Afrikaans, is almost entirely pervaded by a deep sense of dread. The preface speaks of this mood in Afrikaans fiction as ‘an intimation of apocalypse, which implies not just the death of the individual or the ...”