“... 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 ...”

“... spent their brief, uneasy childhoods in clay nests alongside siblings, small, mad planets, black as forest berries. This looping through sensation, through layerings of metaphor and whimsy, this tracing of delicate aerial patternings, this speeding instability is what you get in Zagajewski. Contraries – hard and soft, timidity and boldness, silence ...”

“... these people and these events seem to compose a hysterical opera composed in about equal parts black comedy and magic realism, as if Angela Carter, perhaps, had rewritten The Good Soldier Svejk, a work Meek mentions in his notes; and in the book the Jewish lieutenant, Mutz, has a similar thought. It did not seem possible that a woman whose husband had ...”

“... a page or so. What happened in those two years? In the first, Véra was in a sanatorium in the Black Forest for seven weeks. She was with her mother, and Schiff simply says Véra’s ‘health was also fragile at the time’. Voronina and Boyd offer Véra’s own ‘depression, anxiety, weight loss’ as the reason for her spell away from home. These are ...”

“... over the fire. It’s the size of a marshmallow. It bubbles and blackens to Campfire goo – Burnt-black skin outside Gooey Jew. From the 20th century’s 24/7 chimneys, choo-choo- Train puffs of white smoke rise. The trains waddle full of cattle to the camps. The weightless puffs of smoke are on their way to the sky. Ovens cremate fields of human cow. Ovens ...”

“... all, of Reger’s sentences’ – in a sort of lopsided barbershop trio. One that sings only the black notes. A normal novel is at pains to differentiate between its characters by making them talk, about themselves and about each other, in distinct, individuated ways. He do the police in different voices and so on. In Bernhard, though, there is a convergence ...”

“... Khan, who ran Pakistan’s bomb-building programme, was exposed as the kingpin of an international black market in nuclear technology. Khan was placed under house arrest but subsequently pardoned by Pakistan’s unelected president, General Pervez Musharraf. Officials from the United States and the IAEA were denied permission to interrogate him. According to ...”

“... and Fog, where we can’t put together the bland colour images of the present with the grisly black and white pictures of the past. What on earth can it mean to say this is the same place? At another moment the narrator recalls a film made during the first year of the Occupation, a light comedy called Premier Rendez-vous. The physical film seems strange ...”

“... no longer under Seleucid hegemony, and then in the kingdom of Bithynia, which stretched along the Black Sea coast from the Asian shore of the Bosporus as far as modern Amasra. Perpetually at odds with the neighbouring kingdom of Pergamon, Prusias, the Bithynian king, had remained neutral in the war between Rome and Antiochus, but his long alliance with the ...”

“... as quickly as I managed to get a foot inside the door, I was sent a copy of Byzantium endures – Michael Moorcock. That one, icons iconing, balalaikas balalaikaing, kept me up nights marking pages, memorising passages, and dreaming dreams of a vividness and thrust that I hadn’t experienced since I was in the Army. My well-intentioned friends in Poland ...”

“... What​ was it like growing up in black and white?’ was a question I asked my mother once. Until that moment her memories of childhood, so much more engrossing than any bedtime story, had unspooled in my head in perfect greyscale. (They do still, in childish defiance of the facts.) It wasn’t as if I’d seen many photographs of her as a girl – I still haven’t – but simply that the past, as I had perceived it, was defined by an absence of colour ...”

“... The Invisible Enemy Should Not Exist (until March 2020), is the work of the Chicago-based sculptor Michael Rakowitz. He has resurrected one of the world’s most impressive sculptural creations, the massive and marvellous chimera its Assyrian inventors termed the ‘lamassu’. I do mean marvellous. These are creatures that boast an eagle’s wide wings, a ...”

“... prosopographical breakthrough: a book confidently entitled The Most Evil Men and Women in History (Michael O’Mara, £15.99) and with a cover where the word ‘evil’ appears in black in a type size several magnitudes greater than that of its supporting syntax. Nor should we be surprised for a second time to find that this ...”