“... unstable relationship with race.The show opens with two large flags hanging from the ceiling. David Hammons’s African American Flag (1990) hangs behind Chris Ofili’s Black British version; both recast symbols of empire and the nation-state in the colours of Pan-Africanism: red, black and green. In The Souls of Black Folk (1903), W.E.B. Du Bois wrote ...”

“... waiters, until it becomes their proper nature. It is the same with writers and artists. Byron or David or Robert Lowell cannot slink off and become their ordinary selves in the intervals of being poets and painters and men of the age. Greta Garbo is always Greta Garbo, once she has found the part. But there is quite a different category of actor, as of ...”

“... for works by artists as different from each other as P.D. James, DV8 Physical Dance Theatre and David Lynch. Stephen Egger, an American academic and former policeman who wrote the first doctoral dissertation on the phenomenon, gives a definition/description of serial murder in Serial Murder: An Elusive Phenomenon: A serial murder occurs when one or more ...”

“... of Bethlehem or the pig Doing something unmentionable on the misericord. Ruby’s patience was wearing thin. Crisps and blackcurrant in The Victory Were no longer enough to keep the demon boredom at bay. And Ruby’s boredom was a force, a power of blackness, that all of us feared. Where were we, exactly? I’m no longer sure. Maybe we’d stopped to see ...”

“... by her husband Philip in his awkward smart-casual outfits, he often looking chirpy, she usually wearing an enigmatic smile. Recently I have been going to church a bit too, for boringly pragmatic reasons (school) – something I have never really done before. Apart from being surprised at how restful it can be, I have also found it strange to think that each ...”

“... any man capable of blowing his own nose and fond of the woman could have handled it, I suggest, by wearing plasticine under a French letter.’ The remarks about Swinburne date from 1931. Empson displayed bufferish tendencies at the very beginning of his career, although he didn’t elaborate them into a strategy until his return to England in 1951. Bufferdom ...”

“... This, more or less, is how Present Times begins, and one thing very quickly becomes clear: David Storey likes compound ...”

“... to this nation’.) Opposition to multiculturalism became a key part of the Ukip platform, and of David Cameron’s attempt to protect his government’s right flank from Nigel Farage.Punitive prison sentences (often four or five years long) were handed out to the young British-Asian men charged with rioting in Bradford, many of whom had been taken by their ...”

“... since John Major, shipping our boys out to the Gulf, boots or no boots, his rhetoric at least is wearing steel toe caps. ‘We are going to be in the front line of this whatever happens,’ he told the Commons Liaison Committee, meaning not, as you might think, that we’re going to invade Iraq regardless of public opinion and even if the UN weapons ...”

“... flung open on the white stage and the actress Tilda Swinton – madcap muse du jour – came on wearing a tweed peplum jacket, bloomers and a huge claret bow. She read an extract from Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, said to be Lagerfeld’s favourite novel. Celebrations of the image don’t always show imagination – think how banal the Oscars can be – but ...”

“... of Cesar Augusto Sandino, his hands clasped behind his back, his left foot pointing outwards, wearing high-laced army boots and a ten-gallon hat, is the universal emblem of Nicaragua’s revolutionary movement. In the 1920s Sandino led a prolonged guerrilla campaign against the US marines who had been occupying his country since 1912. The Marines ...”

“... One evening in December 1975 David Plante called on his friend, the novelist Jean Rhys, who was staying in a hotel in South Kensington: ‘a big dreary hotel’, she said, ‘filled with old people whom they won’t allow to drink sweet vermouth’. She was sitting in what the receptionist called ‘the pink lounge’, wearing a pink hat ...”

“... Say ‘David Storey’ and readers of my (and his) generation will recall the final shot of This Sporting Life: Frank Machin (Richard Harris), mired, spavined, raising himself on the rugby field to lurch back into hopeless battle. His life as a professional is over. Football chews up its workforce faster even than the pits ...”

“... night, and before she has even put down her handbag there’s a programme on TV about what she is wearing. ‘She’s frump incarnate,’ the presenter says. On a radio station, the topic of discussion is whether she is ‘a bitch or a babe’. Later, her boss thinks she should have a couple of ‘media consultants’ to help with the project of fixing her ...”

“... by the head of serials, Jonathan Powell, produced by the Birmingham regional drama head, Michael Wearing, and scheduled before Martin had finished the scripts. Third, as a result of its plural structure, the department had gained and kept its reputation as a producer-led, oppositional space, not just for Edge of Darkness, but for Alan Bleasdale’s Boys from ...”