“... show everything as though it enabled harmony and represented plenty: ‘Her hair lay thick and black on the pillow, and beyond her lay the garden, the thicket of cherry trees, covered two and threefold in white flower buds; and the short, squat chimney of the sawmill where we used to play cowboys and Indians.’ Descriptions in the pedantically realistic ...”

“... and with fickle and disturbing acts of imaginative murder, usually (perhaps unsurprisingly in his black-and-while world) on policemen: ‘So lively, that policewoman regulating the traffic, putting her white gloved fingers to her lips and blowing kisses at a baby – and yet it wouldn’t surprise me in the least to see her stone dead the next minute.’ And ...”

“... the One Hundred Years of Solitude type (specifically, a variant of Ursula’s life), only with a black or malevolent feeling. The result is not satisfactory, and may have suggested to Garcia Marquez that the idiom of One Hundred Years of Solitude has, ethically or judgmentally, an affirmative tendency. He has returned to the problem more recently in The ...”

“... however, although admirable in themselves, lend to dilute and confuse what might have been a fine black comedy. ‘She was surprisingly strong for a dead woman,’ notes Victor, as he struggles to disengage himself from the clutches of his first victim. There are other contradictions in the book. The racy style of the narrative is at odds with Victor’s ...”

“... results. Those who harbour hope for a fair trial for Saddam need only look to America’s ‘legal black hole’ in Cuba to realise how unlikely a prospect that is. Kofi Annan has recently been pressing for a much more significant role for the UN in Iraq. Blue-helmeted troops could make a significant contribution to bringing peace to the country; they could at ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... malevolent, piteous or merely inaccurate, ought to be wound up after the publication of Michael Straight’s contribution. Very possibly, Anthony Blunt will one day write such a book himself. But the names have almost all been named, the questions of motive worn smooth, the titles and pensions (some of them) stripped like epaulettes, the spell in ...”

“... was named is not dead at all: he was secretly adopted by a childless rich couple and rechristened Michael Abyad; now a doctor, he lives in America and makes occasional visits to Beirut and the Palestinian Centre for Research. A few days after hearing the story Anton sees a magazine picture of a man standing by a bicycle, looking at bodies in the aftermath of ...”

“... Though it does not say so, Michael Powell’s 700-page autobiography is merely the first volume of a work which Powell rather surprisingly tells us is ‘what my mother would have wished and what I was born for’. Surprising not for the reference to his mother, since he always speaks of her with the greatest affection and respect, but for the seeming dedication to letters in a man who never ceases to proclaim his lifelong devotion to images ...”

“... deputy prime minister (Charles Dance) as part of a repeatedly thwarted scheme to depose the PM (Michael Gambon) – is so outraged by the abuse directed at the government by the leader of the opposition, at the disrespect being shown to his posse, that he rises from his seat and crosses the chamber, in heroic slow motion, through a forest of arms raised in ...”

“... It must be confessed, without apology, that I was a noticeable Leftie in 1968: I was editing the Black Dwarf, a magazine I intended to promote socialist ideas for working-class readers. It was welcomed, however, by a quite different readership – the ‘student generation in revolt’ of Ronald Fraser’s title – and I was made to surrender my editorship ...”

“... million. His rise to fame, fortune and notice in the financial press had begun in the pitch-black economy with a little moonlighting, a hired garage, a gang of welders and 100 flotation tanks. Everything he has touched (since his first business went bankrupt, that is) has turned into tenners. What a triumph for supply-side economics! The trouble, as ...”

“... fishermen found another body washed up on a sandbank. It was identified as that of Atabong Michael Atembe, aged 32, also from Cameroon.The boat had sunk about 250 kilometres up the coast, near the state border with Oaxaca. I went there on a quad bike driven by a local teenager. The sand was littered with clothing. I made an inventory: a pair of ...”

“... Which is just what happened, so we’ve always been told, to the French at Crécy.In his new book, Michael Livingston argues that we have got nearly everything about Crécy wrong. The standard story has been told many times by historians and by novelists, including by Bernard Cornwell twenty years ago in Harlequin. (Cornwell has written a generous foreword to ...”

“... articles; in AI-generated images (‘in thirty minutes of clicking he has landed on not a single Black face’); in a serial killer’s ability to evade capture for years (‘his victims were mostly Black women, many of them sex workers’); in the microaggressions he experiences as a ...”