“... Amphitryon set in a parallel universe, introduces a line from Nietzsche.) As ‘Benjamin Black’, though, he’s shown himself willing to turn out workmanlike crime stories, and some of his best non-Black novels – among them The Book of Evidence (1989) and The Untouchable (1997) – add sinister plot elements to ...”

“... defence and science correspondent, Chapman Pincher. Out of the Express’s triumvirate of black-glass offices in London, Manchester and Glasgow came a torrent of newsprint that set the popular tone for the last days of imperial Britain, the ‘second Elizabethan age’ that was half-thrilled and half-terrified by Britain’s endeavours to build its ...”

“... Queen’s House, the ‘castle’ that Vanbrugh built for himself, the Georgian crescent of Michael Searles’s Paragon – and while Dulwich is less monumental, it does have John Soane’s Picture Gallery and the buildings of Dulwich College, ranging from mannered Georgian to Barry’s lurid neo-Gothic, with the remnants of the Crystal Palace nearby ...”

“... by Alan Walker.* I was also reading – for amusement – the biography of Lytton Strachey by Michael Holroyd and one of Dorothy Parker by Marion Meade. In Holroyd’s book, I was most struck by some portraits – reproduced in full colour – that had been done of Strachey; there’s one by Simon Bussy, drawn in 1904 (the year of Isherwood’s ...”

“... fully conceal. She observes ‘peacocks’ eyes of olive oil skimming atop the vinegar, dapples of black pepper and tawny streaks of mustard popped onto the biggest leaf of lettuce’. ‘Peacocks’ eyes’, ‘dapples’, ‘tawny’ – all signature notes of the mandarin sensibility of an Updike or Nabokov. Morvern’s voice has been praised for its ...”

“... a narc, called Tom Coleman. When the operation had finished, 47 Tulians, almost all of them black, found themselves in jail. At the outset, the bust seemed almost flawless. Coleman, the son of a Texas Ranger and a one-time ‘officer of the year’, had posed as a construction worker down on his luck, infiltrated the underworld of Tulia, and caught ...”

“... of Art in Santa Fe (until 18 October), is a monumental head on a pedestal. The head has a band of black across the eyes, a row of five topknots marching from forehead to nape, and a pattern of spikes on a looped line across the hairless skull. It’s glossy raku ceramic, white with blue glaze dripping like fine rain across the head and face, and represents a ...”

“... her flat so she could watch Neil Jordan’s biopic about the nationalist politician and guerrilla Michael Collins. In the closing sequence, Collins’s fiancée, Kitty, buys her wedding dress, Michael is assassinated by anti-Treatyites in the wilds of County Cork, and Sinead O’Connor sings ‘She Moves through the ...”

“... Wife), 20th-century France (The Statement) and the Jesuit missions in 17th-century Quebec (Black Robe). Each of these places is evoked in prose possessed of that cutting edge of vividness which enabled Moore to write thrillers as well as mainstream fiction. In Black Robe his surgical directness can be ...”

“... been reissued as rather grand paperbacks, along with an eighth, a final hardback selection made by Michael Bloch. They all have titles like Ancestral Voices, Caves of Ice, Through Wood and Dale, Midway on the Waves and Prophesying Peace, and it will not escape the notice of the literate public that they are all derived, one with a bit of a spin on it, from ...”

“... was no room for half measures. Compromise with an idol was a denial of God. In The Idolatrous Eye, Michael O’Connell tackles a more difficult question: why did the Puritans believe not just religious but all forms of theatre to be idolatrous? It’s not difficult to see why they disapproved of the great cycles of religious drama. Although the cycles were ...”

“... comedies made at Ealing Studios in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Indeed, as Stubbs reminds us, Michael Balcon, the studio’s head in its heyday, was explicit in defining its mission. When Ealing was sold in 1955, he placed a plaque on the studio building that read: ‘Here during a quarter of a century many films were made projecting Britain and the ...”

“... blue, its spine adorned with the familiar gilt coat of arms; the Middleton is clad in unornamented black, suggesting a sly homage to the author’s early prose satire The Black Book, with its sardonic farewell to the reader: ‘Now sir, what is your censure now? You have read me, I am sure. Am I ...”

“... On 19 July​ 2015, a sullen, hot day with white skies, an unarmed black man was killed in Cincinnati. The incident began when Officer Ray Tensing, a member of the University of Cincinnati campus police, pulled over Samuel DuBose, whose car was missing its front licence plate. Tensing was wearing a body camera, and when the Hamilton County district attorney released the video ten days later, on 29 July, Americans watching the news that night saw about two minutes of what happened ...”

“... especially defenders of the ‘Third World’ and its hopes, from C.L.R. James and Edward Said to Michael Gilsenan, more or less uniformly find him and his attitudes troubling and sometimes bigoted. He is portrayed as a self-hater and Uncle Tom, a product of the sorts of complex that Frantz Fanon diagnosed. On the other side are the conservative writers ...”