“... which held up the ceremony by two days – it was quite something to see two films in which a black man appeared not only to assert himself but to do so with a certain degree of moral disdain. In the Heat of the Night has a scene in which Mr Tibbs is slapped by a white man and slaps him right back: for many people, that was ‘1968’ writ ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... History of Time. The book contains a few cartoons: a full-bearded God throwing dice towards a black hole, for example. Also some jokes: miniature black holes gobbling up ‘all those odd socks’, four-dimensional slide projector screens becoming unavailable through ‘government cuts’. A three-part companion ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... of Arabic,’ Ahmad says to the owner, grinning conspiratorially at us. ‘Speak Arabic with Pak Michael, go on! He speaks Arabic. Go on! With a beard like that in Yemen you’d perfume it; here you mothball it to get rid of the cockroaches!’ So much for the sacred beard, a sign of piety with the Prophet’s beard the exemplar. It is distinctively Arab ...”

“... from Rio’s favelas and using them for pornographic photo shoots and movies. He showed me two black and white photographs which had been downloaded from the internet. One was of an eight-year-old girl being raped; the other was of a baby less than a year old covered in semen. ‘This material is spreading like lightning over the web,’ he said, ‘but ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... hoot (which he is, the funniest thing until, well, Lowry)? Under the Volcano eats light like a black hole. It is a work of such gravity and connectedness and spectroscopic richness that it is more world than product. It is absolute mass, agglomeration of consciousness and experience and terrific personal grace. It has planetary swagger, it is a planet ...”