“... admired his professionalism and frivolity. More films followed; among them, The bride wore black (1967), Stolen Kisses (1968), The Wild Child (1969), The Story of Adèle H (1975), The Green Room (1978), Finally Sunday (1983). The Letters begin in 1945 and continue to the year of Truffaut’s death. He has some regular correspondents and confidants ...”

“... most eccentric of slices to extract from all that life – a freak blond hair plucked from a jet-black (and horribly unravelling) plait?’ He knows we know the answer. These characters and stories are not less Indian than for whom the claim is made. And the same goes for the stories. The supposed centre that makes them seem marginal, or (later) seeks to ...”

“... about the necessity of class war. The reader is left pondering this resurgence and the strange, black, ugly things that are to ...”

“... were emerging. The heroic image of the Third World was being exchanged for that of the starving black baby in charity advertisements. The Left was in crisis. And there was Islam. The overthrow of the Shah of Iran and all that he had represented in Cold War politics, and the rise of the Khomeinist state, were seen by many as the re-emergence of the ...”

“... as this must increasingly be supplied by technology. The ‘bog, clay and rubble, and the stark black dearth’ that Mr Laurence has had to tread is not beneficial for human nature, and leads to ‘penury, inertness and grimace’. So far as is humanly possible, these volumes are free from errors and omissions, though Mr Laurence invites readers to sent ...”

“... what I’d like to paint – try to imagine that this wall is missing, and instead there is a black abyss and what looks like an audience in a dim theatre, rows and rows of faces, sitting and watching me. And all the faces belong to people whom I know or once knew, and who are now watching my life ... This man with envy; that woman with compassion. There ...”

“... is implied in shots of dancing children, of a grieving father and daughter, was the real hero of black Americans, their promised saviour, King’s death merely a corroboration of the great conspiracy against goodness. Almost as monstrous is the film’s use of Robert Kennedy’s assassination as a mere item in Garrison’s self-vindication and patched-up ...”

“... the first anniversary, he began to wonder, to his horror, about her eyes: Were they brown or black, or grey? Green? Christ, I can’t say ... One spring morning, something gave in him; shouldering his twin grief like a cross, he shut the front door, turned into the street and had walked just ten yards, when, from a dark close, he caught a flash of ...”

“... most of which were ruled by the British or the French. In Liberia the incomers were almost all black and the oligarchy they set up continued to rule the country until two decades after much of the rest of Africa had won its independence. The violent overthrow of the old political order – in 1980 – occurred in the lifetime of many young adults; in ...”

“... in Short Haul Engine, ‘Boyfriend’s Car’. Every word dangerous, every word a specification: Black Nova. Jacked up. Fast. Rhetorical question. Naturally, a girl would choose the adult conspiracy of smoked glass, darkened interiors. Privacy. Its language of moving parts, belts, and unfamiliar fluids. Again, the fast puns, the spaces in the narration, the ...”

“... watching eyes, and her face and head, resting on the table, watching us watching her, fading to black’. The film we have been seeing through these two hundred pages of Dyer’s memory and prose is Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker (1979), a science fiction movie that doesn’t so much transcend the genre as pervert it, turn it over to the history of religion ...”

“... corner. A group of even younger kids is scolded for just hanging around. A sweet-looking young black man helps his little brother with his homework before he goes out to drop a gun down a drain – the weapon he used for a small piece of housekeeping on a character we can scarcely remember. Close to the end of Season Five the montage simply shows the city ...”

“... for the first time, the narrator gets a word in. ‘She wore a strapless gown and slippers of black velvet. Her bare insteps were as white as her young shoulders.’ But then we’re off into Flora’s perspective again: ‘The party seemed to have degenerated into a lot of sober eyes staring at her with nasty compassion from every corner, every cushion ...”

“... handful of other writers who, I feel, might have given us something like Gayev’s ‘I pot the black’ in The Cherry Orchard. (Apparently, Swedish critics found fault with Söderberg for his ‘digressions’ and ‘collages’, and he remained un-understood for some considerable time.) The consultation includes a bizarrely wonderful – and again ...”

“... after the Quartet: poems, plays, a book about Cyprus, other novels. T.S. Eliot greatly admired The Black Book, and two early novels, Pied Piper of Lovers and Panic Spring, have recently been reissued by ELS, a Canadian press. Still, so much of Durrell’s reputation rests, or fails to rest, on the Quartet that this does seem a good place to start one’s ...”