“... are invariably expressions of enthusiasm, celebrating the imaginative freedoms of urban life: for black and Asian writers, London is a place not of exile or alienation, but of ‘self-expansion’. Sandhu’s story gets going in the 18th century. There were blacks in London before then, but he wants to ‘show how they have depicted the city, rather than how ...”

“... to light on a good read for the plane, his eye is assaulted by a thwacking array of swastikas on black, gold and blood-red fields. Approaching them at random but with a certain circumspection, he finds, for example, Philippe van Rindt’s The Trial of Adolf Hitler, in which it is revealed that Hitler survived his attempts at suicide in the bunker; The Murder ...”

“... say and “flawlessly proportioned”,’ she wrote to Vita on 5 June 1918: Julian’s hair was black and silky. Eve found herself wondering what it would feel like to stroke, and promptly did so; she was amazed to feel a sensation akin to pain shoot up her fingers and lodge itself definitely in the region of her heart … she was determined to analyse ...”

“... superyacht beneath him. A woman’s hair may be ‘a sort of aureate beige’ or ‘dyed a maximal black’. Pleasures are technical, liquid and faddish; they are afforded by ‘torrenting’, ‘blasting’, ‘hot-rocking’ or ‘up-skirting’. People hang out at Porkies (a restaurant), Jester (a club) or Dzoker (a pub). DVDs dubbed into the wrong minority ...”

“... Goldcrest has produced All dogs go to heaven (a full-length cartoon) and Mike Hodges’s Black Rainbow, and makes money. The old (real) Goldcrest also made money, in the early days, but mainly it offered what it thought of as quality films, or, as the jargon of the trade would have it, ‘first-class product’. Quality films, but not art films. The ...”

“... all the rest of the features – and performed a ruthless are until it split apart into two coal-black ovals. It was through this dominating organ, that his heavy middle-European accent seemed to issue, and hardly at all from the little mouth, perched below its overhang, that only appeared to serve as a hub, for a cartwheel of wrinkles.’ The librarian ...”

“... the field was a white paradise of loneliness, and a starlit wind made the glass shake like loose, black water and the ice snore on the sill.’ ‘Raindrops, highlighted, were sliding in slant ocelli across the windowpane.’ The ocelli and the alliteration, like the snoring ice and the white paradise, surely belong in some faded poetry book. But even ...”

“... is a singularly fitting profession, requiring cogitation first and foremost. On the other hand, as Michael White and John Gribbin intimate, Hawking seems to have been a listless student and a rather charmless young man before ALS struck, obviously intelligent but lacking any passion to use his intelligence in one direction rather than another. Thus arises the ...”

“... at the scale of structural and environmental racism exposed by the pandemic. This wasn’t news to black, indigenous and Hispanic Americans, who are subject to mass incarceration, have significantly lower incomes and higher unemployment rates than the white population, and for whom the healthcare system and the overwhelmingly segregated education system and ...”

“... of breakdowns and benzedrine. Much as Powell and Pressburger re-created India in Pinewood for Black Narcissus, GWTW represents the triumph of artifice, the South of the 1860s concocted on a Hollywood lot. While the book was an ante-modernist throwback, a 1930s riposte to Harriet Beecher Stowe, the film lovingly embraces the possibilities of technology. It ...”

“... Lawrence’s 1941 Migration series have at last been assembled in their entirety. As a 23-year-old black painter in Harlem, Lawrence chronicled the experiences of black Southerners who fled the Jim Crow South for the cities of the North. The North was far from the promised land: the slums where blacks settled were ...”

“... nearly every mention of knife crime in the rest of the national press was in connection with young Black people in London.According to Home Office data, almost half of all homicides in England and Wales are ‘drug-related’, but this is a very broad definition: recent analysis by Vice News found that it includes incidents in which those involved had been ...”

“... animated by a single brain, they prepare the spell together. She glues on her G-string and the black lace bows (one carefully crooked) that cover her breasts. Between numbers, he officiates as dresser, the spotlights set so that only his arms are seen: she wants the audience to assume her dresser is a maid. The act is provocative yet chaste: the audience ...”

“... in a small suitcase. He was neat but often wore the same clothes – a leather jacket or black and white tweed overcoat and dark corduroy trousers. His money he carried in cash, usually great wads of it. If he was robbed he didn’t much complain about it. The image changed very little after this. White quotes an American observer at the Democratic ...”

“... The continuing American blindness to Vietnam itself, in this and many other instances, notably Michael Cimino’s film The Deer Hunter (1978), can be astonishing, but the myth also shows some genuine self-understanding. Apocalypse Now, in particular, is full of the sense that Americans exported whole chunks of their culture to Vietnam and discovered its ...”