“... 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 ...”

“... of its new, almost unstrung mode. Both books deserve their jackets: Fivemiletown its thunderous black and grey, Walking a Line its little-boy blue and girl pink. It is somewhere between jaunty and kittenish. For someone who first made his name and his mark (in A State of Justice, 1977, and The Strange Museum, 1980) with austere and crunching ...”

“... by the market, still a fake? What does intention matter if your audience doesn’t care about it? Michael ‘Butcher’ Boone, one of the two narrators of Theft, is a once famous Australian artist, newly divorced and down on his luck. His work is now very unfashionable, and he has retreated to a rustic house in New South Wales owned by his patron. Here, ...”

“... forget Lean’s earlier, quieter or darker films, which notably include Brief Encounter (1945), a black and grey masterpiece, and Oliver Twist (1948), an extraordinary conversion of Dickens into some sort of German Expressionist. Another recent book on Lean, by Gene Phillips, is called Beyond the Epic; and we might think ‘Before the Epic’ would also be a ...”

“... of the film, ‘The Mask’, is genuinely unforgettable. It’s set up by a voice speaking from a black screen in the person of Maupassant himself – the dead writer, not the narrator of any of his stories. He’s a little sceptical about what ‘the living’ make of life. Then the story starts. We are at a dance hall, a place that instantly reminds us how ...”

“... greed, and the shot opens on a vast room packed with a ready-made set of nasty-looking people in black, and even the oak-panelled walls seem to be hoping for a bequest. Wes Anderson has said he was thinking of the paintings of Caspar David Friedrich when he made the movie, and while some of the hotel scenes were shot in an old department store, many of them ...”

“... Sometimes he is stopped on the street by a stranger and plied with liquor: ‘“Hell, the poor black man – he’ll be frozen stiff!” He offered me akvavit, and the two of us drank it from the bottle on the street.’ He comes in for racial abuse just once, from a village headman, a Dane by the name of Dorf (‘village’). There are hard and impressive ...”

“... the problems and sufferings of his characters must stand for the problems and sufferings of all black Americans over the past thirty years. The result is stylistic inflation. It is one thing for Hall to be terrified in Atlanta, quite another for him to be ‘terrified’ when he falls in love, terrified when he is happy, terrified even when opening a ...”

“... in love, and now believes that everyone deserves respect and rights, ‘no matter how crippled or black or female’ they are – a brilliant conservation of prejudice at the very moment of its apparent abolition. There’s an additional point here. The earlier proposed Wadiyan democracy that was meant to undo Aladeen’s rule was all about selling oil to ...”

“... the sink above the open toilet. The men in my cell (I am the only white guy – the others are black and Latino) are in for having open alcohol containers on a subway (two), marijuana possession (two), a bar fight (one). Two are a little fuzzy about it. Every two hours or so, the public defenders come through, names are called, and some of us are taken ...”

“... crashed, don’t you know, into fabulous FloridasWhere flowers combine with the eyes of black panthersIn human skin! Rainbows stretched taut like reins’Neath the surface of oceans to greenish blue herds!I’ve seen fermenting great swamps, and fish trapsAmid bullrushes where a Leviathan rots!I’ve seen torrents of water fall into flat calm,And ...”

“... d’un retour au pays natal, a lyrical prose piece about the oppression and liberation of the black population of Martinique, as a title in Harrison’s poem ‘On Not Being Milton’; recently, I found myself returning to the poem and its Yorkshire worries (‘The stutter of the scold out of the branks/of condescension, class and counter-class’) as a ...”

“... up our stories and in terms of feeling really bad about it afterwards. This new memoir from Michael Finkel streaks across a firmament already glittering with apologetic precedents. Stephen Glass, once a popular and ambitious young thing at the New Republic, invented email addresses and whole companies to hide his deceit, and later went on to invent a ...”

“... of New York in two decades running against the legacy of the three-term mayor, the billionaire Michael Bloomberg. Thomas Piketty’s unexpected blockbuster made talk of class conflict safe for polite company, while trend pieces heralded ‘the new socialist wunderkinds of America’ gathered around magazines like the New Inquiry (several of its editors ...”