“... 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 ...”

“... one another in their childhood also insulated him against Eurocentrism: believing that ‘black, white and yellow people are fond of just the same kind of adventures,’ he introduced his readers to Chinese, Japanese and Arabic tales.Censorious colleagues at the Folklore Society said Lang had jumbled up genuinely ancient tales with the work of ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Strauss music, its glamour and easy charm … I really got to know it in the classic period of the black market.’ When the voice says, ‘Of course a situation like that does tempt amateurs,’ the screen shows us a corpse floating in dirty water, and we are prepared for the voice’s readiness to take wreckage as a kind of norm: ‘Vienna doesn’t really ...”

“... Dostoevsky also figures prominently in Kristeva’s book about ‘depression and melancholy’, Black Sun (1987), which includes a long quotation from The Idiot as a prelude to a chapter on Holbein’s painting of the dead Christ, and a whole chapter devoted to Dostoevsky’s ideas of suffering and pardon. ‘Pardon,’ Kristeva memorably says, ‘renews ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... and never wanted to see another book after that.’ All I can say is, he deserved his black and white tiles. He has both autonomy and tact. His translation is full of character, marvellously pointed but in touch with timelessness, relished but without striving for effect. We are in the world of Briggflatts, of Patrick Kavanagh’s ‘The Great ...”