“... rest of his audience, but the real joke is that they in turn find his account of a city covered in black fog, with a huge palace of glass, a pointless and irritating fabrication. The South American Spanish are perhaps more comic in The Purple Land than they ever were to be again in Hudson’s writing. They christen their children not only Conception, Ascension ...”

“... very convincing alternatives, and he is prone to mention only ludicrous ones such as the use of black magic or our all being controlled by demons: if such absurdities were the only conceivable alternatives to his theory, there would surely be little substance to the claim that it is an empirical hypothesis. Chomsky comes closest to giving a substantial ...”

“... We get the following points of view mingled with many others: that of Cotter Martin, a 14-year old black boy, who has jumped the turnstiles to get in for free; that of Russ Hodges, a radio commentator; those of J. Edgar Hoover, Frank Sinatra and Jackie Gleason who have arrived together. Gleason is playing hookey from a rehearsal for The Honeymooners , has been ...”

“... whole peoples to his personal clientela, and redrew the borders of provinces and kingdoms from the Black Sea to the Red. His arrangements were sensible and well founded, as shown by how few of them the victorious Octavian altered after his rival’s suicide. The two strove for years to maintain their precarious equilibrium after the sidelining of ...”

“... The title​ of Cedric Robinson’s Black Marxism is misleading. Shelving it under ‘Marxism’ never seems right for a book that questions the compatibility of Black radicalism and Marxist politics, as well as considering aspects of history, sociology and political theory. Robinson’s reluctance to be classified hasn’t always worked in his favour ...”

“... When​ Black Lives Matter demonstrations erupted across the United States and then the world last year, their target was not Derek Chauvin, the Minneapolis police officer who murdered George Floyd. Floyd’s murder resonated so widely because Chauvin’s brutality signified something deeper and more pervasive. The video footage of Floyd’s death offered evidence of both an ideology (white supremacy) and the system that sustains it (racism) at their most fundamental level: state murder ...”

“... word in the song, and about the words that are missing from it: The song never says that she’s black, and it’s his best Civil Rights song because it never says she’s black. Everybody knows she’s black and it has nothing to do with knowing the newspaper story. You just know that ...”

“... the obvious oddity that Britain’s most famous racist should be worshipped on an island of black people. We ought to respect Tannese belief, Baylis says, but at the same time we have the right to enjoy the irony of it all. The Duke of Edinburgh is on the book’s electric orange cover, with the sun for a halo, palm trees sprouting from his ...”

“... Pembroke. The Rival Poet of Sonnet 86 remains George Chapman, not, as some think, Samuel Daniel or Michael Drayton or Christopher Marlowe or Ben Jonson or, since his was assuredly an ‘alien pen’ (Sonnet 78), Torquato Tasso. Candidates for the doubtful honour of being the Dark Lady are discussed (so far as the list went in 1970) and a slight preference is ...”

“... of highlights, grasping the fact, for example, that the end of a nose or a cheek, even a brown or black nose or cheek, will often be the brightest part of the face – brighter than the ‘white’ of the eye, which is, in fact, usually grey and shadowed by the eye socket – is one step on the path leading from naive to ‘realistic’ representations of ...”

“... question arrests us on the first page of The English Patient:   Every four days she washes his black body, beginning at the destroyed feet ...   She has nursed him for months and she knows the body well, the penis sleeping like a sea horse, the thin tight hips. Hipbones of Christ, she thinks. He is her despairing saint. He lies flat on his back, no ...”

“... years at the offices of Horizon. ‘Understandably, Connolly was never comfortable with Kavan,’ Michael Sheldon wrote in Friends of Promise, his book about Connolly. He was presumably referring to her heroin addiction. Friends and mentors over the years – Rhys Davies. Peter Owen, Brian Aldiss – have made considerable efforts to dispel such feelings of ...”

“... him).Brando was right, judging by the 2004 movie version of The Merchant of Venice, directed by Michael Radford. The film itself is a pedestrian and pretty adaptation that can’t quite decide where it stands on the antisemitism of the main characters, but Pacino is an excellent Shylock, emphasising the character’s furious dignity in the face of ...”

“... creating an emergency in which his true ‘nature’ will reveal itself. It is worth saying (and Michael Moorcock, the chief focus of Greenland’s study, was evidently never tired of saying it) that Science Fiction hoists itself up from the general mass of popular literature only by a positive effort of style. Beside Stanislaw Lem, an Old Master in this ...”

“... centre, and it seems a great distance down her long neck and the gently undulating slopes of her black satin dress – over which a gold watch-chain drops, and beside which a languid arm, veiled in tulle, is arranged – to her hand in the lower right corner of the painting, which reposes upon a diamond rivière, as upon a tiny pet, half-concealed in the ...”