“... American, the CIA chief played with impeccable, icy charm by Robin Wright, hair cut short and dyed black, but otherwise much in the style of her role in the American version of House of Cards. She and Bachmann have a remarkable exchange about their goals, about what all this secrecy and illegality and interference is for. ‘It’s about saving lives,’ she ...”

“... hangings; the two white men among the condemned get to make speeches, while the Indian just has a black sack pulled unceremoniously over his face. And above all we have Jeff Bridges in place of John Wayne. The two men don’t look all that different: shabby and decaying and old, far older than the character in the book can be, if he dies at the age of 68 and ...”

“... tells her it’s time to go back to sleep. She does, having paused only to chat with her black and white guinea pig, which she keeps in a cage close to her bed; just a little girl, just a moment of childhood. In the next scene the three girls are having their hair brushed and being told they must kiss their father before they do anything else. This ...”

“... when Varda, in The Beaches of Agnès, lets her camera run slowly in close-up over Demy’s grey-black hair, finally finding a face at the end of what seemed to be a tour of a forest or a field, I know we are seeing a bit of once cherished organic matter as an instance of ultimate otherness, the way anyone might look when no one is looking. No one except the ...”

“... to take in small doses. As a younger man he appears in clips as the street artist, dressed in black, wearing a crumpled top hat, riding a monocycle at great speed through a crowd, sometimes juggling skittles as he goes. We also see him practising for his great adventure; and performing two earlier sensational coups, a wire-walk between the towers of ...”

“... a few grand words that appear in both book and movie. In the other corner, the exotic, often black, frequently masked, elaborately decorated, elephant-riding, despot-serving nations of the Persian Empire. You can see there is a clash of styles here, particularly in the matter of metal ornaments stuck in the face – the Persian King Xerxes (played by ...”

“... is advertised, and Rick Deckard (played again by Harrison Ford) still drinks Johnny Walker Black Label, although it now comes in a fancy designer bottle. Replicants are on the loose, a lonely blade runner chases them, and is repeatedly and bloodily beaten up for his pains. The old metaphysical questions – what does it mean to be human and who ...”

“... of fiction, but close, in various ways, to her documentary Danton’s Death (2011), a study of a Black man from the Paris suburbs who spends three years at the Cours Simon, a drama school not far from Père Lachaise cemetery. In both films there are intense close-ups of faces, and Diop often allows these and other frames to linger longer than they need to ...”

“... the first of six Pontic rulers to bear the name Mithridates had welded the Greek cities of the Black Sea coast to the Persian and Anatolian lands of the interior to create one of the most successful such mini-states. Mithridates Eupator could likewise face in both directions, a cultured Greek on the one hand, with a fabricated ancestry stretching back to ...”

“... be meaningless. It could be one of the last ways of keeping a secret. Then, take the influence of black music, black history. Indeed, it is there, and Dylan has consistently addressed himself to the social fate of American blacks. But Mellers’s mythic-mindedness leads him to not even discuss ‘The Lonesome Death of ...”

“... drawl:well mi dhu day wok an mi dhu nite wokmi dhu clean wok an mi dhu dutty wokdem seh dat black man is very lazybut if yu si how mi wok yu woodah seh mi crazyInglan is a bitchdere’s no escapin itThe sight of a Black man openly criticising Britain on national television reverberated through diasporic circles. The ...”

“... Asya, the heroine of Michael Ignatieff’s novel of revolution and exile, is born into an aristocratic Russian family in 1900. As a child, she nearly drowns walking out over the thawing ice beneath which the River Vasousa roars. She has a vision there of a great skater. Her brush with death changes her and leaves her with a belief ‘even when fear had her in its clasp ...”

“... prophetic books has recently been called into question in a way which has largely confounded Michael Foot’s purpose in writing The History of Mr Wells. It is clear that Foot first conceived his biography as a celebration of Wells’s socialism – more particularly his ‘libertarian’ socialism, which Foot takes to be healthier than the ...”

“... Some Time in the Sun and instantly announces several elements of a familiar legend. Even in black and white the image is full of warm shadows, and the uncropped version fills out the legend a little further. The desert boots are missing from the Hamilton cover and so is the landscape above the writer’s head: a hillside gracefully cluttered with dark ...”

“... as president of an Oxford college. A more plausible scene would have him growling greetings to the black cleaning lady at a quarter to six in the morning of a dreary January, as he comes in to finish an article about the night soil trade in 18th-century London, in an academic institution that is only just managing to contain him. And he it. Porter’s industry ...”