“... These limitations become more apparent when Hitchens writes about the Left. He tears into Michael Foot for his ‘treacly exaggerations’, his awful sentimentality, his Beaverbrook-worship and his ‘glutinous style’. Fine. But the fact that his general angle of attack on Foot is from the left, and his judgment that Foot ‘has never been otherwise ...”

“... undertones of decay. Taking literally the references in Shakespeare’s sonnets to a mistress ‘black as hell’, Burgess made the Dark Lady of his story a voluptuous East Indian who, after seducing the dramatist, inspired the tragic plays of his maturity by giving him a dose of syphilis. A.L. Rowse, meanwhile, edited the sonnets themselves. Already the ...”

“... In​ Peeping Tom (1960), Michael Powell’s brutal parable on the nature of film, a woman confronts a young cameraman, Mark, in his darkroom. Mrs Stephens, who is blind, realises there’s something disturbing about Mark, something linked to his compulsive filmmaking. ‘I’m listening to my instinct now. And it says: “All this filming isn’t healthy ...”

“... tales’ of humiliation and withdrawal (‘The Shaker Bridal’, say, or ‘The Minister’s Black Veil’), as doomstruck as one of Melville’s fables of embarkation (the first chapter of The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade, entitled ‘A mute goes aboard a boat on the Mississippi’ – where there is no dialogue, only a series of hand-lettered signs ...”

“... tail is darker, greenish and emerges from a dark blue body that possesses a fourth head, charcoal-black and ugly as a troll’s. There are allusions here to the Ouroboros – the snake that eats its tail, a common motif in alchemical art, signifying the union of opposites – and to the process by which the philosopher’s stone was supposed to be ...”

“... who laboured to dig the tunnels retain a certain nobility: engineers and promoters in top hats and black coats, with gangs of navvies, white-shirted, leaning on their picks and shovels. These men took on London, its sticky clay, its buried rivers and polluted air, its monumental self-interest and its blind faith in scientific progress. The original calculation ...”

“... his family – but as ‘the saga of us as a people’: a template for the stories of all Black Americans, one which seemed to demonstrate that despite the systematic destruction of formal family ties by chattel slavery, children of the African diaspora could still recover family histories stretching back to the continent of their ancestors. Drawing ...”

“... the region the Greeks called Scythia, the vast steppe lands to the north and east of the Black Sea. Herodotus shows the Amazons acting peaceably, even amorously in a sexual rendezvous with neighbouring Scythians, but he also mentions a Scythian name for the tribe that suggests a darker side: Oiorpata or ‘man-killers’. The notion of female power ...”

“... which turn a wide cast of villains, friends and villain-friends into so many undifferentiated black marks. But his collective observations of his jailers – especially the prison’s racial dynamics, with white guards dominating their black colleagues, and a Puerto Rican contingent showing the most sympathy to the ...”

“... Clark, the tycoon James Goldsmith and the zoo-keeper John Aspinall arranged a dinner with Conrad Black, owner of the Telegraph, to try to persuade him to order his (entirely independent) editor to stop backing Heseltine. Black refused, but we are left in no doubt that it is at dinner parties such as these that important ...”

“... to Charlie Stavros, ultimately his most reliable friend, strikes up with crazy Jill and crazier black Skeeter and literally walks through fire. Rabbit is rich (1980) is the account of a Rabbit made comfortable when a long-reconciled Janice inherits her father Fred’s motor dealership, which he has enriched with a Toyota agency. Rabbit speculates, at the ...”

“... outside the old Daily Telegraph building in Fleet Street, walking down to the entrance of the big black palace, taking the lift up to the second floor, and bursting into the editor’s office just as the morning conference was about to begin. After explaining the circumstances to the astonished assembly, I intended to invite the editor to move over, plonk ...”

“... Live rather than going to NBC’s Dateline), and misbehaving celebrities like Julia Roberts, Michael Jackson and O.J. Simpson are their meat. On the evening in question, Primetime Live had managed to get hold of a recent O.J. girlfriend – a pretty, big-eyed, unbelievably stupid model – who insisted that she knew he was innocent.Innocence of some sort ...”

“... the act of composition: brow furrowed, pencil poised, the poet sports a rust-red silk scarf over a black shirt and wears a large ring mounted with a chunky ruby. The painting is clumsy but it does express how seriously Hill takes himself and the stupefied awe his critics feel for him. One of Hill’s most notable champions is Christopher Ricks and we may ...”

“... read of the king being served spam. Of course, there were some inequalities, and an enterprising black market (Private Walker in Dad’s Army); and I still remember (or think I do) the farmers in Staffordshire who grudgingly took me and my mother in as evacuees towards the end of the war feasting on lovely fresh brown eggs while we had to make do with our ...”