“... material, at last, that Bayard is at home with, as well as a nod to Umberto Eco’s analysis of Ian Fleming’s narrative structures. True to his initials, Simon uses his training to perform a Sherlock Holmes-like cold reading on Bayard, who responds by requisitioning him in the name of police intelligence. So begins a mismatched-buddy policier that’s ...”

“... ample opportunity for combat at its most basic. At Tamai in March 1884, when Graham ordered the Black Watch to move forward, Captain Andrew Scott-Stevenson found himself in danger of being overcome by a throng of Dervishes until ‘my trusty claymore found its way to the hilt into several black devils. I clove a piece out ...”

“... uncertain in James’s work, as she distances herself from Christie’s formalist model. The Black Tower (1975), yet another novel set in a medical institution (here, a care home for people with disabilities), is so preoccupied with the miseries of its doleful cast of characters that the unravelling of the mystery risks becoming perfunctory. The reader ...”

“... of the idea the putrescent pigs have spread about you, that is, Lorca the bronzed gypsy, with black hair, childlike heart, etc.’ By the end of the year, however, Dalí and Buñuel were planning the script of Un Chien andalou, a Surrealist film of profoundly Spanish cut in its anti-lyrical violence and carnal ...”

“... her affairs with George Barker, David Gascoyne, Eric Siepmann, Ronald Moody, Basil Nicholson, Ian Henderson ... And she could never write about the incident following her release from the asylum, when she was visited in her bedroom by a man with a mutilated leg, wearing her father’s dressing-gown. White lost her virginity that night, and conceived a ...”

“... her son the appropriate medical help because ‘they did not want to get their hands dirty with a black man’s blood.’ The day after the murder, the Lawrences, acting on advice from the Anti-Racist Alliance, took the unusual step of appointing a lawyer, Imran Khan, as their representative – an act of some legal sophistication. Imran Khan was to have a ...”

“... failed to sparkle. The vote at the end was won by the stern young Labour candidate, Will Scobie; Ian Driver, the Green, came second. Farage was last. That doesn’t mean he won’t be South Thanet’s next MP. He and his party are popular there. The latest poll by Lord Ashcroft gives Ukip the seat, with 33 per cent of the vote. It’s easy to see why Farage ...”

“... not Sex and the City … That’s four gay men sitting around talking.’ Meanwhile Issa Rae, the Black creator of HBO’s Insecure (2016-21), defended Dunham against allegations of ‘hipster racism’: ‘There could be more diversity, but I think that’s the fault of [HBO], rather than Lena’s.’It’s never easy to distinguish between drama that breaks ...”

“... to death or middle age.’ ‘A thoroughgoing attempt at a dialectical novel,’ the sociologist Ian Carter judged it in a brilliant History Workshop paper of 1978 that reads Gibbon’s fiction against the economic history of north-east Scotland and the collapse of its smallholder ‘farm life’ in the early 20th century, through emigration, capitalist ...”

“... truth about a father who turns out to have been a maritally entangled commercial traveller and the black sheep of a respectable Glasgow family. Bundling up her infant, Janet withdrew from Blairgowrie to the Spittal of Glenshee, where she rented a cottage. Neat treats this as a passage between opposed cultures and inheritances: from mean-spirited middle-class ...”

“... until they let a real cannibal speak.’ Infuriated by the uneasy response in Western capitals to Ian Smith’s Unilateral Declaration of Independence in Rhodesia, he said: ‘If a white developing country proves that development aid is unnecessary then it has to be destroyed.’ Other neoliberals may not have endorsed this kind of racism, but when demands ...”

“... it’s a big white gannet, with a buff-yellow head, bluish-white bill, and white feathers and black wing tips. It joins two others and they fly high and intently along the coast. Then we reach the high black cliffs where a colony of fulmars glides; one of them follows us, flapping its wings for a spell, then gliding ...”

“... portraits, the pristine virtual reality handouts. But you’ll smell it. An unmannerly belch of black fumes. A brewery pall that hits you as soon as you emerge from the tunnel: oasty, hot in the throat, disquieting. Like griddled bird shit. The world through a sepia filter. Gravy browning dust-storms. Iron filings in a furious wind that scrapes the ...”

“... refugees, said the Jewish writer William Zuckerman in 1958, ‘has literally succeeded in changing black into white, lies into truth and serious social injustice into an act of justice, praised by thousands.’ Evidently, the process continues.Apart from Arabs and Muslims, the chief villains of the book are the British. They are persistently accused of ...”

“... a tumbler for the false teeth she preferred not to wear. An oval mirror hung on a chain and a black and white photograph was pressed into the frame. It was of her husband, Michael, dead for 35 years by then and sorely missed. My education in guilt began there. It was where I first heard the words ‘the bad fire’, a place for boys who didn’t finish ...”