“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... freaky nightclub, except that the grey gets recast as brightness by the extraordinary block of black springing out at you from just off centre in The Luncheon. Around this magnetic weight, which represents a pea coat, there cluster various off-whites: a striped collar, a youth’s pale cheeks, his boater and his summer trousers, plus the chequered damask ...”

“... in her hostility to Europe, much the same applies to the campaign currently being waged by what Michael Heseltine calls ‘our North American press’ – that is to say, the Murdoch and Black empires – against Britain forging closer ties in Europe. It is Conrad Black who, in his ...”

“... preventable deaths. They are Antonio Bradley, Anibal Carrasquillo, Ricardo Cruciani, Albert Drye, Michael Lopez, Elijah Muhammed, Michael Nieves, Mary Yehudah and Tarz Youngblood. The name ‘Rikers Island’ conjures a monolithic structure, but there are ten correctional facilities on the island, seven of which are ...”

“... New Republicans’ readiness to kill to achieve these ends. The coloured races, the ‘swarms of black and brown’, were unlikely to meet the ‘new needs of efficiency’, he argued, and he equivocated embarrassingly about the Jews. The eventual disappearance of separate races would be the outcome of a gradual process of assimilation and attrition. This ...”

“... grand jury chose not to return an indictment for the police killing of Eric Garner – a large black man standing on the sidewalk of a street in New York City. The attention of millions had been transfixed by a video that showed the fatal attempt to arrest Garner. Looking on wearily as he saw the police approach, Garner told a cop that he was doing nothing ...”

“... dots, primary colours and thick contours – the light ground of the dots first, the heavy black of the outlines last. Thus, while a Lichtenstein might look industrially ready-made, it is actually, as Michael Lobel demonstrates in his careful study, a layering of mechanical reproduction (comic), handwork ...”

“... babies and endangered species. This logo, as it would now be called, of the kneeling, shackled black was clear, compact, memorable, touching, and yet entirely decorous – with the added attraction, as Hugh Honour astutely points out in The Image of the Black, of hinting at conversion as well as ...”

“... equivalent ‘little bugger’, not as cowardly a substitution as the author of this biography, Michael Snyder, seems to think. ‘Motherfucker’ was taboo, but also unfamiliar in a British context. ‘Bugger’ was a robust stand-in.Snyder starts his book with Sitwell’s epiphany but acknowledges the exaggeration behind Purdy’s claim that she had saved ...”

“... in 1995. Mossbourne’s first head, or ‘principal’ as they are often called in academies, was Michael Wilshaw, who subsequently became chief inspector at Ofsted.Both City and Mossbourne began with a single cohort of Year 7s (11 and 12-year-olds) before building up to a full school and sixth form after seven years, which gave their heads time to decide how ...”

“... afternoon on which four white men are standing trial in a city courthouse accused of depriving a black man of his civil rights, especially the right not to be batoned following traffic violations. The sheriff’s car with which I have been making tender eye-contact in the rear-view mirror seems to have turned off, somewhere on Compton or Alondra. I’m now ...”