“... red roundel at the centre. I would be hard pressed now to roll a fag by the flickering light of a black and white movie. In the late Seventies, I dabbled with Annie Leclerc’s bitter-sweet little book, Au feu du jour, about the end of her affair with nicotine – Klein quotes it liberally in his section on Casablanca – but resolved to leave it until I too ...”

“... chess (with Martin Amis, who felt humbly as if he always had, or anyway always ought to have, the black pieces). Women found him instantly attractive. And he rode a motor bike. The illustrations here are more than adequate reminders of his dash and industry. On the whole, as one might expect, the samples of the late Sixties String-Along strips fare least ...”

“... features both a fine-grained depiction of a bookish Jewish boy’s childhood in rough, mostly black, pre-gentrification Brooklyn, as well as explicitly comic-book elements: the boy and his black best friend find a ring that confers on them the powers of flight and invisibility. Conversely, the smaller books tend to ...”

“... suicide or an accident.There’s also the question of what he was called. Before settling on Ian Robert Maxwell he had repeatedly changed his name according to the political needs of the moment. Born Abraham Leib Hoch into a Yiddish-speaking community in the town of Solotvino, then in Czechoslovakia and today in Ukraine, he had used ten different names ...”

“... your vote. You know he’ll use his.’ Also coming to the big screen this month, backed by black-rights campaigners and Charter 88, Operation Black Vote: ‘Let them know you exist.’ These are not initiatives calculated to return a Tory majority. ‘Our generation is political, not party political,’ says Gareth ...”

“... on Top of the Pops or the first time they ate in an Angus Steak House and enjoyed a slice of Black Forest Gâteau. Of these recent decades, the 1970s is the most reviled. I once had a colleague who’d been a little girl in the 1970s, and not a particularly poor one, yet she would shudder and say: ‘Oh, it was like Eastern Europe then, all stews and ...”

“... of each character’s relationship to the deceased.Marsh explained in her autobiography, Black Beech and Honeydew, that she wrote so frequently about the theatre because it was what she knew best, but also because ‘it is [the actors’] business to give every reaction its due and then some. In that respect they can be said to be unusually ...”

“... to Kibroth-Hattaavah. Dr Rowlands did not explain exactly what Kibroth-Hattaavah was, nor does Ian Anstruther in his well-judged introduction to this reissue of Eric; he assumes that we all know our Fourth Book of Moses, which reveals it to be some sort of discreditable landfill for ‘the people that lusted’ (in fact, the Israelites who ended up in it ...”

“... self-representation. The one thing almost everyone knows about Turpin is that he rode his mare Black Bess from London to York in the course of a single night. This turns out to be a myth – there was no Black Bess, no ride from London to York – yet it has passed for fact since 1834 when Harrison Ainsworth published a ...”

“... Writing about Goya’s Black Paintings in Art After Modernism , a collection of essays published in 1984 by the New Museum in downtown New York, Kathy Acker wrote: ‘The only reaction against an unbearable society is equally unbearable nonsense.’ She once said she didn’t expect anyone to read any of her books all the way through from beginning to end: ‘even in Empire of the Senseless , which is the most narrative book, you could read pretty much anywhere ...”

“... Blackwood, 38 at the time and the mother of three daughters. Blackwood told Lowell’s biographer, Ian Hamilton, that after the party Lowell moved into her London house – ‘I mean instantly, that night.’On 27 April, three days before the party, Lowell had written to Hardwick: ‘I miss you both every minute. I may telephone for you to come and get ...”

“... the location shifts from London to a mine shaft somewhere in South Africa, where sweating Black miners in filthy hard hats are drilling into the rock. In a voiceover, the chairman says that 80 per cent of the world’s diamonds come from South Africa, most of them dug out of shafts of diamond-bearing clay at depths of three thousand feet. ‘The whole ...”

“... yellow as well. And was that orange just then?) There had been no preliminary drawing done – in black – on those large sheets of white paper, no sketching. All this work, this whole process, I felt, was almost as much of a confrontation between the two of us as it was a collaboration. And so what, I wondered, must it feel like to be him doing ...”

“... fully conceal. She observes ‘peacocks’ eyes of olive oil skimming atop the vinegar, dapples of black pepper and tawny streaks of mustard popped onto the biggest leaf of lettuce’. ‘Peacocks’ eyes’, ‘dapples’, ‘tawny’ – all signature notes of the mandarin sensibility of an Updike or Nabokov. Morvern’s voice has been praised for its ...”

“... for posterity the scene surrounding a band that ‘sounded like Airdrie … sounded like a black fucking hole’, since most of their peers ‘went off and became social workers and did courses on how to teach English as a foreign language or got a job in Greggs’ or ‘died or disappeared or went into seclusion, more like’. Airdrieonians grow up ...”