“... rejoicing at the death of his predecessor’. Even Day Lewis’s admiring editor and close friend, Ian Parsons, when he was putting together a Collected Poems, shrank from reprinting the poet’s Laureate offerings. He called these works ‘banal when they were not embarrassingly disingenuous’. And this, over the centuries, has been the way of things with ...”

“... it could be argued that the Aussies bring it on themselves, with their Barry McKenzies, their Ian Chappells, their self-parodying Foster ads, and so on. And there is the accent: for some reason more readily mimickable than any of our own regional twangs. Theories about the Australian accent are just as snooty as theories about Australia. Some say that it ...”

“... his whole enterprise would have been seriously imperilled: This is what happened. On a calm, black night in June, 1941, Sergeant-Pilot Thomas Prosser was poaching over Northern France. His Hurricane 11B was black in its camouflage paint. Inside the cockpit, red light from the instrument panel fell softly on Prosser’s ...”

“... book proves, however, Miller can quickly be rejected for second place. It goes, unquestionably, to Ian Botham. Indeed in one crucial respect, Botham beats even the great Sobers himself. Only 22 times in over a thousand Test matches has a player taken five wickets in an innings and scored a hundred in the same match. Frank Keating tells us: ‘Thirteen players ...”

“... of Merchant-Ivory’s film adaptation of E.M Forster’s Howard’s End, and a new novel from Ian McEwan. To a reader of First Love, Last Rites or In Between the Sheets it will seem an odd conjunction. Nevertheless, it is to Wilson’s implicit prescription that McEwan’s novels seem increasingly to answer, and in ...”

“... a volcano five times in eruption’). As well as the poems and prose pieces the book includes 52 black and white photographs, all taken by Auden, appendices containing pie-charts and graphs, and a fine, coloured folding map. There is an extensive bibliography and one chapter is entirely devoted to an anthology of excerpts from other books about Iceland. The ...”

“... that was that. This horror story is one of 28 such tales assembled by Malcolm MacPherson in The Black Box: Cockpit Voice Recorder Accounts of In-Flight Accidents and it is no more or less harrowing than most of the others.* The masking-tape oversight was freakish, to be sure, but in this book the freakish comes to seem commonplace: spontaneous fires in the ...”

“... to mention in case the censor took exception. (As it is, some of the letters are redacted with fat black lines of disapproval.) Instead they related chance conversations in the street and country bike rides and trips to the pictures: Gone with the Wind, in the opinion of Miss Eve Bowman of Highbury, ‘was a lovely film, and it ran three hours and forty ...”

“... I noticed that no one else was celebrating. I had scored the most egregious of own goals. You’re Black, you’re a Jehovah’s Witness, you can’t play football. Your life is over. Between the summers of 1998 and 2001 – between leaving school and eventually, after resitting my A levels, going to university – I worked at McDonald’s in Coseley, near ...”

“... same time, though, they were nothing like as spooky as my Beano visitants. After all, I wasn’t black. Well, not black-skinned. Later on, of course, in my school Liberal Studies classes, I came to a fuller understanding of what these Klansmen were really all about. Even so, I didn’t know much about them, except that ...”

“... into hysteria. The women ululate. A military helicopter waits overhead. A fire-engine sprays the black crowd tautening among the hills of the north-west of the city. Strung with lights and tannoys, the integuments of the half-built blocks and electricity substations whisper the dry earth spooned out, passed among the crowd and eaten. Smoke and fog copulate ...”

“... and sculptures, Death sometimes accessorised with a jaunty crown, a headwrap, a ladies’ black headdress, or a clutch of worms wriggling through his eye sockets.’ Plus, the hoods we all thought were worn by executioners were more often worn by those about to be executed. Hooded prisoners were not only less likely to resist but less likely to elicit ...”

“... framed along the lines that the time is past when a white woman can attempt to describe the ‘black’ experience of Britain by living among British non-whites as though they were inhabitants of the equatorial rain-forest rather than our neighbours in the next house or (more likely) in the streets over the hill. Several reviewers have already made this ...”

“... Matters, and is the main reason she thinks Solange does matter: ‘The album was her ode to Black culture, Black feminism, her elders, as well as a document of the impact of racism and ancestral trauma on Black people’s mental well-being.’ With A Seat at the Table, Solange ...”

“... once all-powerful at Athena, has been forced to retire after being accused of racism by two of his black students. He wants to tell everything to Zuckerman. Now in his early seventies, Silk had almost been destroyed by the injustice that ended his career but, with the help of Viagra, is now enjoying an intense love affair with the much-younger-than-him ...”