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“... later wrote, in a two-room apartment without a bath. He introduced her to skid-row bars and the black ghetto. He brought her to a police line-up. He showed her the electric chair. ‘Because I deliberately chose one point of view, I had an intimacy with this city that I was unable to feel with New York,’ she reported on leaving Chicago. Intimacy ...”

“... rig, set up over six nights so that the camera could dart and swoop across the gleaming black floors, through empty arches and up towards distant cornices and discreet modern light fittings. At each turn it discovers works exhibited in the gallery over the past seventy years, and where those works are unavailable or no longer extant they’ve been ...”

“... been dropped, and Red Rabbit will be hopping its way up the bestseller lists in a matter of weeks (Michael Joseph, £18.99). Clancy rocketed to fame – the cliché isn’t inapt for such a notorious gizmologist, though he’d no doubt give you the make and serial number of the rocket in question – in the mid-1980s with his first novel, The Hunt for Red ...”

“... establishment English, a question that might just as well come under ‘Art’: how does a black writer in English find an authentic voice: what does s/he do with the cultural legacy of Milton, on the one hand, and Creole writers, on the other: which of the various English-speaking audiences should be aimed at? He describes the dilemma as ...”

“... justify all of Naipaul’s intensities and obsessions. These eight pieces – a long one on the Michael X murders in Trinidad, five on Argentina and Uruguay, one on the Congo and one on Joseph Conrad – are held together by Conradian preoccupations. They represent an ‘effort of thought and sympathy’, an effort that ‘does not stop with the aspect of ...”

“... bibulous: to express her point of view, Jensen has embellished Weedon Grossmith’s drawings with black railway smoke and a suggestion of alcoholic fumes. He is supporting Waterhouse’s suggestion that sensible Carrie’s diary is ever so slightly mad. Perhaps all diarists expose a sort of madness in themselves. The diary of raving-mad Daniel ...”

“... the law of conquest. In his stimulating work on Medieval literacy, From Memory to Written Record, Michael Clanchy has stressed the importance of this conflict in Medieval culture between the clerks’ notions of records and rights which were expressed in parchment (notions congenial to desk-bound historians) and the notions of warriors, men of the sword. In ...”

“... than her own, and its even more terrible consequences.’ Clearly, a dreadful experience. But Michael Shelden, George Orwell’s biographer and in Spurling’s view one of those responsible for disparaging Sonia, has a slightly different take on the event. Interviewing her sister and half-brother, he claims that fearing for her life in the struggle with ...”

“... with its proprietor’s economic interests and opinions, and the Telegraph, owned then by Conrad Black, a Canadian by birth, reflected Black’s far right American views. Both Murdoch and Black were and are extreme Europhobes. Major resigned on the morning of his defeat in 1997. His ...”

“... II – on the balcony of one, Hyman Roth slices up a birthday cake with a frosting map of Cuba as Michael Corleone and other Mob chieftains look on – or from the classic Soviet-era agitprop film I Am Cuba, in which rich Americans frolic around rooftop swimming-pools. Meantime, a few storeys below, a revolution looms. These relics are the hotels the Mob ...”

“... passing, like a pleasant sitting-room with chintzy chairs, into another room at the back. It has a black-and-white checked floor and is full of easels. At each easel there is an old woman, wearing a smock. Some have paintbrushes in their hands and are managing to dip them occasionally into paint and splodge on the paper in front of them. Such a passage would ...”

“... went on to describe the park at the top of the cliffs, full of prowling servicemen in the wartime black-out, a sex jungle at night. He felt nervous, but Tennessee was in his element. Neither of the two most memorable characters in this book was ‘anybody’: Frank Merlo, the playwright’s lover and adviser, who died of cancer and/or a broken heart, his long ...”

“... of Buenos Aires, make this book as absorbing as any thriller. Where Costantini stops short at the black hole into which the desaparecidos vanished, Omar Rivabella takes us inside, and incidentally reminds us that the moral choice which Francisco Sanctis enjoyed was something of a luxury. The reader of Requiem for a Woman’s Soul has to piece together the ...”

“... they sup on unsuspecting humans when they can, but otherwise it’s work and pleasure as usual: black clothes, pale faces, no brains. There are glimpses of a later London, where the escalators in the Underground never work and trains are late ‘due to delays’; a whole litter of movie references; and good gags about journalism and art colleges. But what ...”

“... here, to tell the truth,’ Sancho says, presumably telling the truth. ‘For one thing I’m black and white in a full-colour universe.’ And for the moment, he doesn’t seem visible to anyone except his father. Will he die if his father stops thinking about him? ‘If you get imagined into being, does that mean that after that you can just be?’ If ...”