“... land of transplanted urban dream kingdoms, a paradise for poets who do not wish to be disturbed. Michael Viney’s documentary, The Corner of the Eye, opens with a slow sweep across this landscape, a picture of distances fringed with purple and a few tawny cows nosing through the foreground, then switches to a little white cottage in the midst of it all, and ...”

“... In the days​ before artists brought colour to the cover, the London Review of Books was black and white. Of course, originally, it had no front at all: the first edition, in 1979, was meekly folded into the New York Review of Books. The following year it jumped out of that pouch and into a world where literary journals were routinely typographical ...”

“... and was married to a Māori woman, I didn’t hear about Ahi Kaa until the mid-1980s. Sebastian Black, a colleague of mine at the University of Auckland, had moved in next door with his long-time partner, the historian Judith Binney. In September 1986, Sebastian told me that Judith was warned by one of her Māori students that a group called Ahi Kaa was ...”

“... division, of attraction and repulsion, and much of it seemed (to later philosophers) a chaos: a ‘Black Death’ or a ‘Walpurgis-nightmare’. The moral psychology which Romantic duality promoted, and which, in Herdman’s account, scientific psychology naturalises through a cerebral anatomy, wants its independence – not least from psychology as its own ...”

“... homosexual orgy; James Dean being roped in for a one-night stand; Zsa Zsa Gabor getting her famous black eye from Hutton-fancier Rubirosa (after whose magnificent appendage smart restaurants named their giant pepper mills). Curiously blind to her family firm’s exploitation, Barbara launched many philanthropic schemes in Tangiers, where hangers-on cashed in ...”

“... around, the decay of the guild-dominated constitutions some cities had worked out after the Black Death, a hangover from a period of rapid growth and immigration, a tendency for prominent families to move out to rural estates and go county, distortions arising from the multiply-caused ‘price revolution’ or inflation of the 16th century, shifts away ...”

“... me is also walking: if I stop, he stops; if I run, he runs. I turn around: no one. Everything is black, there is no exit, and I turn and turn corners that always lead to the street where no one waits for me, no one follows, where I follow a man who trips and gets up and says when he sees me: no one. The later version of this story is better known, and much ...”

“... Tangier Assignment. A toothbrush. A book titled Psycho-Cybernetics. An inhaler. A hand mirror. Black shoe polish. Someone reading this piece might say: ‘So? A list of personal effects? What’s the big deal?’ Well, it’s the limits, and the pathos. It might be budget astronaut equipment. The apprehensive emphasis on personal care. Is it vanity or ...”

“... literature on contemporary attitudes towards animals generally, and towards pets in particular. Black Beauty is mentioned in passing, but nowhere do we hear about the Romanticism that may have helped shape the strong and affectionate feelings that Germans even now hold for animals and nature; nor do we meet Eliot’s cats or Kipling’s rich ...”

“... feeling: ‘good furniture’, ‘good paintings’, ‘such a good part of London’, ‘The black risotto is outstanding, if you like good things.’ His protagonists are people of the utmost discrimination, and yet they are able to take correspondingly little comfort from it. If anything, it seems to be a further source of danger to them: Adam, in A ...”

“... went to a London bookshop looking for a copy of Peter Fryer’s Staying Power: The History of Black People in Britain (1984). When she asked the shop assistant for help she was told ‘Madam, there were no black people in England before 1945.’ In fact, as David Olusoga’s remarkable book shows, people racialised as ...”

“... Elias Moore, aka Smoke and Stack, twin brothers played by an alternately caddish and cantankerous Michael B. Jordan, return home to Clarksdale in the Mississippi Delta in 1932. Smoke and Stack aren’t content to take on a sharecropper’s plot, but want to be entrepreneurial New Negroes. The twins have been away – fighting in the First World War, pimping ...”

“... and the shore, I find a deep pool in the grey, silty, slightly sulphurous sand – this is the Black Strand. I remember from childhood how hill folk used to come to Narin’s great sweeping strand and stand all day at the head of the strand in a sulphur spring, their dark trousers rolled up or frocks tucked into their knickers. The ‘saltwaterers’, they ...”

“... Farson, in The Gilded Gutter Life of Francis Bacon (also 1993), gives it a passing reference. Michael Peppiatt, in Francis Bacon: Anatomy of an Enigma (2008), gives the year of Bacon’s departure for the cottage as 1942, adding: ‘The enforced idleness, free of wartime anxieties and the distractions of London, served as a catalyst to his real ...”

“... she did, over and over, till she spat like a veteran. Someone else taught her how to smoke. From Michael Jackson she learned how to grab her crotch. Are these not accomplishments, hard-won for a girl from a nice family? So often Andersen seems to miss the point. He will, persistently, describe Madonna as a transcendent beauty, when, as everyone can ...”