“... than just passively ‘reflecting’. The centre of Turner’s book is a cry for more information. Michael Moorcock’s The Dragon in the Sword has nothing at all to do with any of these concerns, and on the face of it, it is hard to see how the two books could belong in the same genre. Perhaps Moorcock’s should be reclassified as fantasy, for it is set in a ...”

“... and schools, all owed something to Pound in general and to the Pisan sequence in particular. Black Mountain, the Beats, the New York School, ‘confessional’ poets such as Lowell and Berryman: none of them are imaginable, in their various experiments and excellences, without the precedent of Pound. And, second, there were a few devoted but enormously ...”

“... held at the Prado, curated by Leticia Ruiz Gómez, and a monograph by the American art historian Michael Cole.Around 1535, a girl was born in the city of Cremona, fifty miles south-east of Milan, to Amilcare Anguissola and his second wife, Bianca Ponzone. Amilcare was a member of the minor nobility and Bianca the daughter of a local count. The Anguissola ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... described in a poem how the dark nightmare entered his own life in childhood: When I was five the black dreams came; Nothing after was quite the same. Come back early or never come. The poem is entitled ‘Autobiography’, but there is little in it of what one usually means by that term; the immediate occasion of his terror, the death of his mother, is not ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Ike Eze-anyika’s Canteen Culture, which won the 1998 Saga Prize ‘for the best first novel by a black British or Irish writer’, is a fictional exposé of the Met (‘the arsehole of the Civil Service’) and an episodic comedy caper. Team I of Northwick police station – Bubba, Lionel, Speedy, Sponge, moustachioed Saddam and Jazz (who’s ...”

“... best-known practitioners – all men of the same generation, born in the mid to late 1960s – are Michael Chabon, Junot Díaz and Jonathan Lethem. The books they wrote were interested in popular culture or counterculture as much as in the thoughts and passions of characters. Chabon’s The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (2000) chronicled the rise of ...”

“... how the names should be grouped by a principle of ‘meaningful adjacency’. As best he could, Michael Arad listed the names near or next to those with whom they had some sort of living affiliation. The memorial genre that includes trees, pools and waterfalls arouses expectations of an enforced absorption, an unignorable demand that one register the ...”

“... opted for a bikini wax.) Apart from the matelot’s scarf round his neck, the rest was his lithe, black, naked bod. (For comparison, on this stretch of the tour Jagger mostly wore jerseys representing local American football teams.) Prince’s biracial, polysexual band likewise came off as a distinctly queer sight in this locale. They were everything that ...”

“... set up an amazing social programme, which Channel 4 did a documentary on, to help underprivileged black kids from inner cities escape to the countryside, so a bit like working farms or city farms …’ ‘It’s a great story,’ the MP said. ‘Came to England aged three from Jamaica. Grew up in sort of real poverty – the back end of Birmingham, big ...”

“... she seems not to have had a ghost, unlike John Prescott, who was ventriloquised by Hunter Davies; Michael Levy credits a journalist friend, Ned Temko, for his ‘invaluable help, talent and patience’. You certainly don’t hear the Cherie described by Michael Levy, ‘every bit the get-ahead barrister’, who on their ...”

“... can endure this tension every day of his life is a fool and changes the world.’ It is, as Michael Hamburger remarked in his survey of postwar German writing, After the Second Flood, an earnest of Grass’s sophistication as a dialectician: by putting his shoulder to the wheel of gradual social change while insisting on art’s autonomy he was ...”

“... the fetching. More engaging is a visit to the village of Middleton, and to the poet and critic Michael Hamburger, whose dreams and memories might have been created expressly for this book. ‘Why it was that on my first visit to Michael’s house I instantly felt as if I lived or had once lived there, in every respect ...”

“... Michael Clune​ first took heroin in July 1997. Afterwards, he lay on the roof of his friend Chip’s New York apartment: A single cloud moved through the blue sky … My eye was a glass box, and inside it there was no time. I kept the cloud inside it. I wish I could show it to you. I never imagined this could happen ...”