“... reasons the whole operation is taken over by the Americans – a bad lot, save for a solitary black one. There’s a sudden intensification of worry about the plans of the Oitarians on the Moon – who in fact want to colonise part of the Earth, since their own planet is becoming uninhabitable. With a crashing of narrative gears mankind is manoeuvred to ...”

“... traitor is executed, and the film ends with detailed verbal information, in white letters on a black screen, about the deaths of all the remaining four chief characters we have met, not too long after the events of the film. Three others have died in the course of the story. But as you can probably tell even from this quick and nasty summary, the film is ...”

“... they look like a wall ready for papering. Backgrounds overlaid with strong accents in brown and black or with patches of red, blue and green, bright as flags on a yacht. The whole articulated by hard pencil lines, some ruled, some making simple curves and circles. All of these things can be found both in Ben Nicholson’s landscapes and still lifes and in ...”

“... commuter who has channelled her mother’s Jamaican roots into consistent solidarity with the black culture and community of her adopted American homeland while simultaneously refusing to lose sight of the complexity of her own perspective as the daughter of a working-class white Englishman. In the essay ‘Speaking in Tongues’ from her first ...”

“... in the film. They meet at the roller-coaster, talk business, take a ride. Slater, who has a shaggy black crew cut, and talks and grins like Jack Nicholson without a mind, is shown full face on the swooping ride, delighted, obviously having such an uncomplicated good time that he has entirely forgotten his drug sale and its dangers and his prospects. Or if he ...”

“... race, sex and the loss of political innocence of the novel’s young male narrator, offspring of a black father and white mother, take the work far beyond the category of topical satire. Anonymous has been strongly influenced by All the King’s Men (1946). His narrator, Henry Burton, the preppy, intellectual grandson of a ...”

“... the lusting Breedt. There is a Shakespeare-spouting polyglot: the Thembu manservant April, whose black features wear a white mask contrived by Quinn and mutilated by Breedt. There is Breedt’s wife, fresh from a Boer War concentration camp and challenged by April’s rebellious son. And as each chases the other round and round, like figures in some ...”

“... Conrad Black is not the only tycoon to have dreamed of global domination while buying and selling newspapers, and he is not the only tycoon to have had people fawning over him on the way up and shunning him on the way down; he is not the only tycoon to have lived large, issued writs and faced criminal charges; but he is the only tycoon with a wholly distinctive prose style ...”

“... the second collection of poems by Cortney Lamar Charleston (Haymarket, £12), describes growing up Black in white suburbia. In ‘Hip-Hop Introspective’:Kids ask what FUBU means. White girls look at meconstantly. DMX never seems to be screaming.The underground heads north on my playlistswhile an old poster peels away from the wall.I’m beside myself almost ...”

“... on German literature and writing radio plays, Gert Hofmann began to produce disconcerting novels. Michael Hofmann, his son, the poet, confronted him head-on in his collection, Acrimony, and in 1987 wrote in the LRB (25 June) about the second of the novels to be translated into English, Our Conquest. This covers the first two days of peace in a small town in ...”

“... Leone Company – a British philanthropic corporation founded in 1792 for the resettlement of black soldiers who had served as loyalists in the American War of Independence – used legitimate commerce to weaponise African consumption against the slave trade and slavery. This was the reason Benson was so concerned about his soaked tobacco: if local ...”

“... only, or chiefly, because of who wrote it. The background is pure white, the lettering scarlet and black. Not the expected livery for a book subtitled ‘A Documentary’ (but, as it happens, exactly the jacket colours of a recent mass-paperback humorous compilation by a woman about men). That subtitle does make its way onto the jacket (insofar as authors ...”

“... cities nearer the coast. The city’s patron deity was Elagabal, whose immanent form was a conical black stone. His priests, of whom Julius Bassianus was chief, were still socially dominant in the region (they were perhaps, but by no means certainly, descended from the extinct royal dynasty). Bassianus had two daughters, Maesa and Domna. Severus, by then a ...”

“... Bill’s advisers bullet-pointing paperbacks composed by a peripatetic, a white man who wrote in black-face. Griffin does not aspire to Easy’s confidential charm, his bright-eyed savvy, his innocence. He’s a white man’s black, darker in spirit, thwarted and confused. And New Orleans, the setting for Sallis’s ...”

“... one would probably do better to read the infant Rilke. One might read Bernhard: Spring of black flowers, you are driven by an endless wind from the north, I will sleep, tomorrow the snow and solitude will already cover me after your shoes …But one might as well read Celan, or perhaps merely something histrionic translated from the Spanish. One might ...”