“... of an ideological doctrine? In a post-feminist age, whose great writers (Ursula Le Guin, Toni Morrison, Christa Wolf) are not women writers but just writers, Atwood does not easily fit some category labelled feminist: The Robber Bride, whose male figures are mostly not even violent but simply inept (the masculine ‘masquerade’, said ...”

“... of the most powerful recent or contemporary novelists. In its shadowed and unreliable depths Toni Morrison, Kazuo Ishiguro, Leonardo Sciascia, Alejo Carpentier have searched out their material, reflections of ourselves; and from A State of Independence his second novel (1986), to The Nature of Blood, Caryl Phillips, too, has been scrying for ...”

“... to occupy a smaller and smaller cultural space. Apart from the superstars like Philip Roth or Toni Morrison, literary writers in America are accorded a social status roughly equivalent to that of artisanal potters producing, like them, lovely, unnecessary work that hardly anyone cares enough about to want. (That’s the kind of writer Kathryn ...”

“... a wider world of writing. There are chapters on black authors (Ralph Ellison, Zora Neale Hurston, Toni Morrison, James Baldwin, Robert Hayden, Jay Wright) as well as on 12 women writers. Toni Morrison (‘a child of Faulkner’) is given shorter shrift than she deserves and told off for being ideological, but some ...”

“... praise from American critics. Whitehead is black and comparisons were made to Ralph Ellison, Toni Morrison and Ishmael Reed. John Updike has called him ‘blithely gifted’, ‘the young African-American writer to watch’. Whitehead’s new novel, John Henry Days, is longer and more ambitious than The Intuitionist, and the suggestion in its title ...”

“... across as that of a boy for another boy rather than the friendship of an adult for a junior.’ To Toni Morrison, Jim seemed a ‘buffoon’, wearing an ‘ill-made clown suit’.In Percival Everett’s​ retelling of Huckleberry Finn from Jim’s perspective, the clown suit has been deliberately put on. James begins, as Twain’s novel does, with Huck ...”

“... being told to ‘check your privilege’, and it’s titillating. In an introduction to Beloved, Toni Morrison wrote about her attempt to write about the ‘different history of black women’ in America: ‘a history in which marriage was discouraged, impossible or illegal; in which birthing children was required, but “having” them, being ...”

“... line up to offer puffs for Book Business: ‘brilliant, moving and profoundly insightful’ (Toni Morrison); ‘a putative classic … fine and impeccable style’ (Norman Mailer); ‘an extremely important literary document, elegantly written and impeccably argued’ (E.L. Doctorow). Norton should distribute little blue sachets of salt, like the ...”

“... punishment. They took the initiative. Clinton, hailed as the ‘first black president’ by Toni Morrison, ended what he called ‘welfare as we know it’ and deregulated financial markets. Amid a national panic about ‘street terrorists’, he signed the most draconian crime bill in US history in 1994, following it up two years later with an ...”

“... or the debates it has brought about in Britain or the United States; it’s hard, too, to imagine Toni Morrison or Caryl Phillips being asked to take charge of such matters. As Christopher Miller points out in The French Atlantic Triangle, in France ‘literature was one of the most important battlegrounds for the debate on slavery.’ But in spite of ...”

“... and deliberately to acquire the art of taking control. This, perhaps, is the challenge to which Toni Morrison referred when she wrote: ‘The very serious function of racism … is distraction. It keeps you from doing your work.’ Throughout the book, Whitehead emphasises the barriers Black people come up against when trying to make their way. The ...”

“... of understanding and of judgment ... are invested in the overnight.’ After all, who would set Toni Morrison next to Paul Celan? And lest this reference to black women writers of the Eighties appear a random example, we might look at Steiner’s musings on the relation between gender and art. He considers the act of aesthetic creativity an imitation ...”

“... as Richardson, Rebecca West, Alexandra Kollontai, Christina Stead, Jean Rhys, Doris Lessing, Toni Morrison and Alice Walker, Miller’s deliberately unsystematic readings have an impressive cumulative power. By the end of the book, as she discusses the work of black and working-class writers, women who have been so excluded from the culture’s ...”

“... because she is, at moments, Renata Adler, and X sounds like a genius because she is variously Toni Morrison, Cy Twombly, Susan Sontag, Cindy Sherman, Susan Howe, Richard Hell, Clarice Lispector, Bob Dylan and Edie Sedgwick. (Not an exhaustive list – and if it doesn’t cohere, well, the Zelig-like career of an artist like X isn’t meant to.) Not ...”

“... and now with Asian Americans. In the marvellous lectures collected in Playing in the Dark, Toni Morrison talks about the way in which black characters in classic American writing have had to carry the burden of the author’s symbolism. How much more galling, when you are a writer yourself, being made to tote that bale in some cultural-historical ...”