“... on the complex miracle the devil has performed. A similar sort of miracle occurs in Bulgakov’s Black Snow, the (unfinished) novel he wrote about his experiences with the Moscow Art Theatre, a place he called ‘the graveyard of my plays’. A new work, initially accepted by the theatre, disappears into the crossfire of backstage politics and vanities, and ...”

“... model of Fuller’s Dymaxion car, a paramecium-shaped tricycle with a Ford V8 engine. Beside it, a black and white video showed the Dymaxion car slinking past a row of box-like Depression-era Fords and sidling with UFO-like ease into a parking space its own exact size. Fuller intended to add what he called ‘jet stilts’ to the vehicle someday, so it could ...”

“... her son the appropriate medical help because ‘they did not want to get their hands dirty with a black man’s blood.’ The day after the murder, the Lawrences, acting on advice from the Anti-Racist Alliance, took the unusual step of appointing a lawyer, Imran Khan, as their representative – an act of some legal sophistication. Imran Khan was to have a ...”

“... Times to his empire in 1966, and was similarly rewarded with a seat in the House of Lords. Conrad Black came on the scene in the spring of 1985, paid £10 million for a minority stake in the Telegraph Group, and later the same year became its controlling shareholder for the modest expenditure of another £20 million. He, too, has acquired a peerage, to the ...”

“... a layer of enigmatic stardust over films I wouldn’t otherwise have been interested in, such as Michael Winner’s Lawman or the Danny La Rue vehicle Our Miss Fred – or, indeed, David Essex’s Stardust. These films were out of reach, but only just out of reach. Forbidden fruit hanging almost low enough to be plucked.I knew that I wanted to read Offbeat ...”

“... and a zinc coffin, and do something to the remains involving chicken heads, inverted crosses and black candles, I don’t doubt that he would. In an epigraph over his preface – the first words in the book, effectively – he quotes an oblique little exchange from Waiting for Godot: Estragon: All the dead voices. Vladimir: To be dead is not enough for ...”

“... as in my own constituency of Birkenhead – have been hit by unemployment as if by some kind of Black Death. Since the advent of this Tory government in 1979, 65,000 of the city’s jobs, one in five, have vanished. In manufacturing alone the total loss of jobs has been 40,000, with the result that Liverpool’s manufacturing industry has been almost halved ...”

“... Virginia Woolf said, but she wasn’t thinking of brain surgery. Memories of Amnesia is a black joke about inner landscapes, or more precisely, about a mind turned inside out. Subjectivity, that spreading territory of so much modern writing, becomes a sort of intellectual circus, an arena where hectic and unanswerable arguments cross like missiles in ...”

“... in Victoriana. Her sex-life has become lavishly promiscuous, though her resident lover, Charles, a black Old Etonian lawyer, has proved bisexual. Partly for commercial and partly for aesthetic reasons, Fanny buys an empty Victorian church in Birmingham, in the middle of an area scheduled for redevelopment as a Leisure Park. Fred Jobling, a middle-aged Council ...”

“... visiting a son in the American South in 1927. When the bus leaves Washington for Virginia, the black passengers move silently to the back, segregating the whole bus, except for Paley’s mother and older sister, who are sitting in what is now the wrong section. The driver asks them to move, but Paley’s mother refuses. ‘When I first tried to write this ...”

“... had been got up to look like a charity case, or a Wanted poster. Dead or alive. ‘Vote Michael Moorcock’, it said. ‘King of the City’. King of the City, a hefty London novel, character-packed, busy with competing narratives (confessing, denouncing, celebrating, plea-bargaining for its own sanity), was being punted by its publicists as ‘the ...”

“... published by Suhrkamp in block colours with a single, contrasting stripe. Orange, lemon, lime, black. I own about a foot and a half of these now, and am somehow still being caught out by further, half-familiar titles. Do I own a copy of Ich dachte an die goldenen Zeiten (‘I Thought about the Golden Times’), and if not, how not? Does it exist? Hrabal in ...”

“... are everything to them. It is gross, but also comically inept: ‘I look in the mirror. Silvered black hair; gray lizardskin shoes’ – it’s a jigsaw of a Whistler speaking, not a person! Once he has put the pieces together, they proclaim: I am, like my mother, a broad-shouldered, slim-waisted woman with strong thighs; neither small-breasted nor ...”

“... the three of them barricade themselves with their luggage. One ends up shrugging at the rather black and white notations: the ‘air-raid sandwiches packed for him by his friend the chaplain, a whole package of sandwiches with plenty of sausage in them, and the terrible thing was that they tasted so good’, ‘the schnapps was excellent,’ ‘they were ...”

“... will serve our democracy.’ It sits alongside a picture of a snarling and dagger-toothed black dog, advertising the building’s thorough security arrangements. In the room where the meeting is to be held, officials of Obasanjo’s People’s Democratic Party mill around while a television in the corner shows a documentary about the transatlantic ...”