“... skin is a shade darker than midnight). According to Selvon’s friend, the Barbadian novelist George Lamming (who died last month), Selvon was ‘a master at the contracted phrase “niggergram”, meaning the circulation of rumour at top speed. There can hardly be another writer who has contributed in this way to the vocabulary of West Indian ...”

“... economic experiments suggested by eminent thinkers of Africa and the Caribbean, from C.L.R. James, George Padmore and Eric Williams of Trinidad, to Ghana’s Kwame Nkrumah, Julius Nyerere of Tanzania and Michael Manley of Jamaica. The New International Economic Order (NIEO) called for and the 1974 charter of economic rights put forward by the UN General ...”

“... enthusiast who blew himself up while stalking his ex-girlfriend. There was her near neighbour, George Waterfield Russell Jr, aka the Eastside Killer, who was apprenticing as a prowler and peeping Tom during the same period, before killing and mutilating three young women in 1990. Fraser has a personal stake, in other words, in solving the conundrum. She ...”

“... shown its hand.Now that its existence, nature and power have been proved to us, why shouldn’t we believe that the members of this group arranged 9/11? Or that Bill Gates is planning to kill us with vaccines, or inject us with nanochips hidden in vaccines, or both? Why shouldn’t the entire course of world events have been planned by a group of elite ...”

“... its title. Not many readers will get the allusion here to Tocqueville and Beaumont in America by George Wilson Pierson, published in 1938 and for a long time the standard account of the nine-month journey which Tocqueville undertook with his friend Gustave de Beaumont, ostensibly for the purpose of writing a report on the American prison system, but which ...”

“... Vietnam era, the other marking the transition between the end of the Cold War and the unveiling of George Bush’s ‘new world order’. Both events were also turning points in the history of American television, reaching unprecedented numbers of viewers. According to Major-General Perry Smith in How CNN fought the war, CNN’s public relations office ...”

“... dominates the first chapter of The Arch-Poet much as Purgatory gives focus to its ending. Again we are presented with an Old Man and a young. They meet beneath another bare tree, where the water of immortality sometimes bubbles up. The Old Man has been waiting to drink for more than half a century, but is always distracted from the prize by a woman of the ...”

“... Homosexuality:​ do we really have to talk about it? Earl Winterton, aged 71, introducing a debate in the House of Lords in 1954, apologised for bringing forward ‘this nauseating subject’. In his youth it was never mentioned in ‘decent mixed society’; in male society it was ‘contemptuously described by a good old English cognomen’ which he refused to utter in the House ...”

“... it came to working with other race and ideological groups.’ Only Mandela’s nephews, Kaiser and George Matanzima, were as close to Mandela as Tambo and Sisulu: to Mandela’s great pain, they were later to betray the cause by leading the Transkei Bantustan to its spurious independence. It was to Kaiser Matanzima that poor Eveline turned for help a few years ...”

“... a soprano soloist into the third and fourth movements to sing settings of two poems by Stefan George. The first, ‘Litanei’, begins ‘Tief ist die Trauer die mich umdüstert’ (‘Deep is the sadness that envelops me’) and ends with the plea, ‘Töte das sehnen, schliesse die Wunde’ (‘Kill the longing, close the wound!’); the ...”

“... in America. This neighbourhood, across the Hudson from uptown Manhattan, about a mile south of the George Washington Bridge on the Jersey side, has lost more than a little of its character and charm over the years with the proliferation of McMansions – what my father used to call ‘Greco-Roman fortresses’ or ‘mausolea’ – which take up entire ...”

“... of the non-indictment of Brown’s killer, a white police officer called Darren Wilson. ‘We are captured, brother, surrounded by the majoritarian bandits of America,’ he writes in a typically despairing passage: The terrible truth is that we cannot will ourselves to an escape on our own … You have been cast ...”

“... After two hours​ on the tarmac at LaGuardia Airport, the flight was cancelled and we were deplaned. I had been seated next to a former congresswoman who lost to another incumbent in 2022 as a result of redistricting, after decades in the House of Representatives. Like me, she was on her way to Chicago to attend the Democratic National Convention ...”

“... becoming a stalwart of light entertainment broadcasting in the 1950s. He once introduced a talk by George Bernard Shaw. ‘Young man,’ Shaw said, pointing to the microphone, ‘this is a devilish contraption. You can’t deceive it – so don’t try.’ Gamlin later said he remembered all his life the genial advice Shaw had given him. He didn’t want to ...”

“... to her daily when she was in her eighties. By turns guilty and grumbling (‘a perpetual burning bush of fury in my chest’), Larkin’s attitude towards her doesn’t seem particularly unusual, though his dutifulness does. Even so, Woolworth’s would hardly have been her cup of tea. The other long-standing lady in Larkin’s life (and who stood for a good ...”