“... camera peers past him to flag it up, in the style of a Hitchcock movie or a Tintin book – a black Citroën DS, the car Barthes put on the cover of Mythologies (1957), in which there’s a discussion of its then futuristic lines, has followed him since his first visit to the Salpêtrière. Inside it are two men with moustaches, umbrellas, cheap suits and ...”

“... when, in the hut one night, a group of good ol’ boys had decided to have some fun with the only black soldier in the detail. The scheme was to castrate him. Nobody was more astonished than Ron to hear his own voice coming across the darkened bunks. ‘“If you want to get to him, you’ve got to come through me.” I’d’ve been dead if I hadn’t been ...”

“... mentioned his debt to Fante in his novel Women; Bukowski’s publisher, John Martin of the Black Sparrow Press, set about reprinting Fante’s books. Bukowski, who had been devoted to both books ‘like a man who had found gold in the city dump’ since discovering them by chance in the early 1950s, contributed an autobiographical preface to Ask the ...”

“... Nature Miss Gordimer breaks out of the enclave with a novel about a Jewish girl who makes love to black Africans, travels around the world and returns to her homeland, ‘the new African state that used to be South Africa’, as the wife of the Chairman of the OAU (the Organisation of African Unity). This is an optimistic conclusion, perhaps a pipe-dream. The ...”

“... To Christopher Isherwood I One among friends who stood above your grave I cast a clod of earth from those heaped there Down on the great brass-handled coffin lid. It rattled on the oak like a door knocker. And at that sound I saw your face beneath Wedged in an oblong shadow under ground: Flesh creased, eyes shut, jaw jutting, And on the mouth a smile: triumph of one Who has escaped from lifelong colleagues roaring For him to join their throng ...”

“... at Marvel Comics in the early 1960s that gave the world Spider-Man, the Hulk, the X-Men, Iron Man, Black Panther and the rest – spent the 46 years between his departure from a hands-on role at Marvel and his death in 2018 getting paid to play the part of Stan Lee, the writer-editor who had supervised etc. Giving the fans what they wanted involved remembering ...”

“... of ‘The Alhambra’, where his only contact with the world of the streets is a superannuated black skivvy: ‘As nearly as any honky could, he took into account her problems with her prostitute daughter, her jailed criminal son, and with the other son whose HIV troubles and scrambled wives and children were too complicated to describe.’ Why does one ...”

“... about dress and decoration once and for all early in life (one thinks of Stanley Morison’s black suits and Corbusier’s bow tie), Lutyens wore, as his daughter remembers, brown suits, brown shoes, duck-egg green shirts with high starched butterfly collars and a narrow black tie. His drawing-rooms had ...”

“... the famous exotic accoutrements of work (monk’s habit, nocturnal regime and endless cups of black coffee), nevertheless construed work itself on the model of the industrious bourgeois; who perceived himself as less the Frenhofer (or even the Napoleon) than the Birotteau of art, for whom getting the job done was the task to hand and the main danger, not ...”

“... is wearing away health and social services already overburdened by an ageing population, while the black economy grows, recycling its income via the minicab, pub, tanning-studio, sauna/ brothel, loan-shark, flat-letting and ‘security’ businesses. The Daily Record (‘two million readers in Scotland’), a nauseous tabloid, carries stories – written ...”

“... flowers in her hair, heard her voice softly calling men to her as she shivers half-naked in her black velvet dress.’ This conversation allegedly took place at a brothel in Brest, but it fits the world of Croisset like a glove; how agreeably fatuous to be able to imagine the prostitute shivering half-naked as you stare into the log fire. From these ...”

“... Snell was led to execution in Arkansas. He had boasted of murdering a Jewish storekeeper and a black policeman. Leaflets had gone out across the South, warning of reprisal if he was executed by the Zoggists. As Snell was being readied for the lethal injection, he snarled: ‘Look over your shoulder. Justice is coming.’ And then hours later the centre of ...”

“... to the gaping peasants of the tabloid press. Though she never went to the length of adopting a black toy boy, as the fictional Margot did with Chokey, la Mosley certainly attended her share of bals nègres at Nancy Cunard’s. She kept a circle of gay male friends, from Gerald Berners to Cecil Beaton, at a time when homosexuals were being whacked to a pulp ...”

“... set up an amazing social programme, which Channel 4 did a documentary on, to help underprivileged black kids from inner cities escape to the countryside, so a bit like working farms or city farms …’ ‘It’s a great story,’ the MP said. ‘Came to England aged three from Jamaica. Grew up in sort of real poverty – the back end of Birmingham, big ...”

“... young man. More worrying are the potted hagiographies of people still very much alive, such as Christopher Stringer of the Natural History Museum: ‘born to a Cockney, working-class couple, Stringer was partly raised by foster parents. He had none of the advantages of accent, manner or prestigious schooling enjoyed by most successful academics in ...”