“... they weren’t watching. Written, directed and photographed by Cuarón, the film is in black and white, and opens with an image of what seems be a tiled wall. Credits are palely projected on it, but it’s hard to pay attention to them because the tiles are so interesting. It isn’t a wall, it turns out, it’s a floor, and the camera is looking down at ...”

“... but helpless against them. Even when reduced to the size of a postage stamp, or to black and white, there is no mistaking the pull and the skill and the force of his ...”

“... them either, and yet they are right in thinking that childhood reminiscences make seductive books. Michael Schmidt was brought up in Mexico, and in his ‘not strictly autobiographical novel’, The Colonist, he turns with brilliant and painful concentration to his early years. No doubt he was in search of himself, and the making of what he now is – a ...”

“... began to be seen as a ‘problem’. Enoch Powell prophesied ‘rivers of blood’ and white working-class fascists shaved their heads. A series of Immigration Acts was passed, dividing families, stemming the flow. Most of the migrant workers had originally meant to stay a few years; go back with some money. But it didn’t often work out that ...”

“... Country. He said that he’d bought the farm mainly because he wanted to build it up for his son, Michael, who worked alongside him. But a month ago he’d driven into Ixopo to get some provisions when the farm radio in his bakkie sounded an alarm ‘for Mr Arthur or Michael Mitchell’. Either Mitchell Sr or Mitchell Jr ...”

“... sixty. A few passers-by watch the arrival of the celebrities, of which there seem to be only two, Michael Yorke and Michael Caine (who later slags off the film). The audience is not star-studded either and heavily sprinkled with those freaks, autograph-hunters and emotional cripples who haunt the stage-doors of American ...”

“... let you take a swing. You watched his face as your shrivelled rock-hard Conker blew his prize into white chips across the playground. When he cried, you’d tell him – ‘Don’t Blub, Little Man.’ But then you’d meet a senior whose Conker looked strange and transparent. He had hollowed out the middle and filled it full of glue which hardened into ...”

“... out a verdict reached after calm deliberation by a jury of you honest citizens black folk and white, right there in the Fourteenth Amendment in black and white, the jury that’s the bulwark and cornerstone of American justice like you don’t see in these dictator atheist countries. And it’s not just the characters ...”

“... into certain conventions of lyrical prose: ‘At night, from the stair window, 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 ...”

“... Rainey, the antihero-cum-hero of London and the South-East (‘his flabby ashen face, his round white shoulders, his downy tits’), sells space in magazines that don’t exist to guileless foreign firms (his work has an almost patriotic dimension); gets bladdered in the pub on the way home, while entertaining fantasies of Michaela the barmaid; smokes ...”

“... runs off, leaving behind almost a million pounds in cash and some large bags of unidentified white powder (‘Why don’t you taste it like in the movies?’ ‘Because I still wouldn’t know what it was’), it comes as no great surprise that they decide to keep the lot. Equally unsurprising are their subsequent fallings-out, fears of being caught and ...”

“... of show-business, it is unlikely that any overweight person will ever again be elected to the White House. A necessary (if not sufficient) condition for electoral success nowadays is that one should ‘come over well’ on television. And fat people, by and large and on the average, do not. Mr Cockerell’s absorbing book might, at first, be seen as a ...”

“... are always somewhere intact’), and a scream and a poem within the poem, a shaking hand and a white page. In the second poem Paterson offers a convenient and very funny picture of himself at work: The new poem is coming along like a dream: this is the big one, the one that will finally consolidate everything. It is the usual, but different: a series of ...”

“... to an English-language bookshop – there’s even one at the railway station – to buy a copy of Michael Crichton’s new novel, Next (HarperCollins, £17.99). But why go to the trouble of spending the whole of Wednesday morning buying a book, when I could just download it now, on Tuesday evening? Diesel eBooks were offering Next in three formats: I plumped ...”

“... to rehouse all these homeless people. So there was work in our town. The oldest men, men with white beards, men you would have called on at most to fix your stove in winter, now clambered up and down scaffolding poles. They were like bearded weasels. I too found work. I had a notebook, and wrote down metres and centimetres and kept a tally of ...”