“... blood never having figured on the Bennett dining table even in its relatively refined form of black pudding. Some food we did consider too lowly to eat, tripe for instance, which was a favourite of my grandma, and chitterlings from the same ‘uggery-buggery pie shop’ down Tong Road in Wortley.Until I started to read the novels and diaries of the ...”

“... field of literature like a meteorite out of a cloudless sky, our very own qibla, our inscrutable Black Stone. That the first surviving Western poetry, born within a generation or two of the alphabet, should also be so well-achieved is astonishing. There is nothing tentative about the opening books of the Iliad or the Odyssey, no indication that these are ...”

“... were in despair. Returning in the morning she found that Fraser ‘had painted the entire place black – walls, ceiling, all the woodwork, everything was completely black. And so these little light, pale studies, very fragile pieces of paper, shone, and were set off in an amazing way.’ So artists loved the way Fraser ...”

“... the third of his collaborations with Herrmann. It is a very atypical Hitchcock, a return to black and white for the first time in a few years and shot in a low-key documentary style. It tells the true story (or true-ish: there is a tacked-on happy ending) of a jazz musician, played by Henry Fonda, who is wrongly accused of armed robbery and put through ...”

“... to a metaphysical belief system that maps onto a culture’s history and ethics. But, to borrow Christopher Warnes’s contrast between ontology and irreverence in his Magical Realism and the Postcolonial Novel,* the approach of contemporary retellers of myths, including Ugrešić, makes clear that the readers they have in mind aren’t concerned with ...”

“... Beast’ herself, doing a photo-shoot for David Bailey, ‘sprawling with her legs wide apart, her black satin crotch glinting between her scrawny 55-year-old thighs’. Melvyn Bragg, filming his reaction shots for the South Bank Show, ‘smiling, simpering, giggling, looking down at his nails’. Richard Harris at the Savoy in 1990, ‘playing pocket ...”

“... blacksmith an ideal heroic shadow behind his contemporary successor, a representative of the black economy, ‘unpursued by conscience or by priest’: but the poem’s apparent sense of the involvement of economic with moral collapse is not pursued beyond a kind of soured grumble. And ‘The Garden’ opens with a condemnation of what Tomlinson calls ...”

“... out the Centre’s orders: The directive sent to Guk contained unintentional passages of deep black comedy which revealed terrifying gaps in the Centre’s understanding of Western society in general and Britain in particular. Guk was told that an ‘important sign’ of British preparations for nuclear war would probably be ‘increased purchases of ...”

“... are everything to them. It is gross, but also comically inept: ‘I look in the mirror. Silvered black hair; gray lizardskin shoes’ – it’s a jigsaw of a Whistler speaking, not a person! Once he has put the pieces together, they proclaim: I am, like my mother, a broad-shouldered, slim-waisted woman with strong thighs; neither small-breasted nor ...”

“... a cricket-playing Protestant stockbroker called Adrien who strikes Ellen as a ‘grown-up Christopher Robin’, and his cousin Bobbie. Life seems idyllic until Ellen catches her flat-mate together with the balding and maladroit Bobbie. Insane with jealousy, Ellen attacks Myra with the bread-knife and kills her, making it look, however, as if the ...”

“... is a send-up. There’s an infuriating frivolity, cynicism and finally a vacuousness.’ Christopher Booker: ‘Peter Cook once said, back in the 1960s, “Britain is in danger of sinking giggling into the sea,” and I think we really are doing that now.’The key word here is ‘giggling’ (or in some versions of the ...”

“... laid on a grand night-time tour that climaxed in a visit to the Colosseum, which – according to Christopher Woodward in his excellent In Ruins – ‘was lit from inside by red lamps so that, as if ablaze, it cast a bloody glow on to the grass and the ruddy brick ruins on the surrounding slopes.’* Descanting to Albert Speer, his pet pseudo-classical ...”

“... to a simple rule that determines their sequence in a given line by assessing the colour – black or white – of neighbouring cells in the previous line. The pattern is left to evolve through iteration of the rule. An astronomically large set of such rules can be defined, and Wolfram charted the behaviour of as many of them as he could. Despite their ...”

“... is a shame, on the other hand, that the exciting theoretical work of complexity theorists such as Christopher Langton, Don Farmer and Stuart Kauffman was not incorporated into Keller’s synthesis. It’s clear that genes have a very real physical and chemical existence, and that the ‘gene kit’ and associated DNA regulatory components of a given species ...”

“... among them are posters of Rashid Ladoja, the sitting governor of Oyo State, and of his deputy, Christopher Alao-Akala, who is also running for governor. A little over a year ago Ladoja was impeached on trumped-up charges by a handful of members of the state assembly backed by a gang of armed militia; Akala assumed his place while Ladoja’s appeal wound ...”