“... In a respectful but chary review of The Life and Times of Michael K (1983) in the New York Review of Books, Nadine Gordimer wrote about J.M. Coetzee’s ‘conscious choice’ of allegory as a literary mode in his first three novels. The reasons for this, she speculated, were temperamental: It seemed he did so out of a kind of opposing desire to hold himself clear of events and their daily, grubby, tragic consequences in which, like everyone else living in South Africa, he is up to the neck, and about which he had an inner compulsion to write ...”

“... with a charming little girl, as the bows bounce on her plaits; a gracious châtelaine with a young black boy and a darling little capering dog are engaged in something so outlandish that you look on shaken at the filth materialising under your eyes. ‘Auntie Walker’s Samplers’, the new works on the walls in Camden Arts Centre, made in situ for one of the ...”

“... in Richmond, California, a town in the East Bay, north of Oakland and Berkeley, whose thriving Black communities maintained cultural and affective ties to Southern culture through music, religion and food. She enrolled in adult education classes and by the early 1960s was working as a nurse while promoting a burgeoning side venture as a maker of ‘Crazy ...”

“... 1934, educated by Jesuits, and spent formative periods of his youth in New York, San Francisco and Black Mountain, North Carolina. His reverence for the Virgin folded easily into his adoration of Hollywood’s golden age stars. But he also became something of a star himself. His early poems were inspired by queer desire and systematic derangement achieved ...”

“... literary renunciations or betrayals involved in writing as a privileged tourist, he does have two black central characters and speaks in their voices with the same confidence that he does in those of his white men and women. Davis Morel, an African-American holistic doctor, psychologist and militant anti-Christian polemicist newly arrived in Botswana, and ...”

“... facts that the narrator knows, or wants to know, about his parents and grandparents. In June 1914 Michael and Una O’Shaughnessy have a reason for their stay in Cornwall: to conceal the date of birth of their child, conceived out of wedlock. This child is Rene, who grows up in Dublin, Bray and Sandymount in the 1920s. In 1934 she is an actress in a touring ...”

“... his most genuine belief perhaps being that when he performed poetry readings ‘stripped to a black leather or satin posing-pouch’, the poems took on another meaning. No doubt: but one connected to Jeremy Reed rather than his poems. The last third of Kirkup’s book is given to the account of a love affair with a young American, ‘the most beautiful ...”

“... Readers making their way through Michael Bracewell’s latest novel may gradually become aware of a small but persistent ache: it comes of the author nudging them in the ribs. There is no chance of being caught napping during the various crises and cruces of The Conclave because Bracewell signposts them all with a diligence and clarity that would not disgrace a sightseeing guide ...”

“... by that rickety wood. I’d seen it before, in that frame, and I knew who it was: my grandfather Michael. I knew that’s who it was though I’d never met him. The grandfather was covered in dust and damp patches dried in. But that was him: he had the darkest eyes I’d ever seen. His hair was slick, combed up to a glistening ridge; the lips were thin, the ...”

“... below – but there is a tenth man in the picture, who does not apparently merit a namecheck: a black servant. He is in the background, visible between the heads of Burney and Warton, carrying a salver with a pair of wide-bodied decanters on it. His shoulders tilt slightly forward; he moves with the butler’s measured plod as he bears the precious cargo of ...”

“... the Russians do, or love it as the Americans do. But we found our own fear: the scrabbling of the black bear’s claws at the screen door, the creaking silence of the woods, the cold. In Europe it is the hand of human labour, the millennial arts of settlement and civilisation, which awaken awe. In Canada, the hands have done so little. Instead, there is the ...”

“... American political exiles in the Seventies, beached in Algiers, like Eldridge Cleaver and the Black Panthers, and in Switzerland, like Leary. He always seemed to be able to afford champagne and skis. There is also no doubt of his despair, particularly after the failure of his second marriage, exhausted by seven years of flight and harassment. And things ...”

“... a photograph of Uncle Alyosha sitting straight-backed, legs akimbo, red stars on his collar, his black boots glistening, his hands folded over a sword resting on his knee. He holds his chin stiffly erect and he has exactly the same thin amused smile, the same superbly assured carriage as in the photograph we have of him as a Chevalier Guards’ officer at ...”

“... of the book, and it makes constant capital-lettered appearances, from the episode in which a Black Mamba is loose on the boat that brings Cheeta to America to dancer Tosca Roulien getting knocked down by John Huston’s car. According to Cheeta, and he should know, the contradictions in human feelings about Death appear most vividly in our paradoxical ...”

“... local powers and odd, un-Roman ways of doing things. In Anatolia, the Pyrenees, the Vosges and the Black Forest, the Welsh marches and Yorkshire moors, archaeology and the occasional literary source show us patterns of settlement and society that no longer look towards, or even acknowledge the existence of an imperial centre, as they had done 50 years ...”