“... Tate. While Tate read from his work, Stuart spoke about his difficulty in publishing his novel Black List, Section H, which had finally come out from an American university press. He did not look like a 70-year-old man. He was tall, his frame was thin but strong, his hair was grey in a crew cut. His accent sounded foreign. His position that night was that ...”

“... Guard was called in to suppress rioting. Among the survivors was Chester Himes, a twenty-year-old black man serving a twenty-year sentence for armed robbery. Himes had already seen his share of troubles but, as Lawrence Jackson writes in his impressive biography, they ‘did not inspire him’ the way that ‘stumbling through the gore of two cell block ...”

“... the one at which Sheena taught. He signed a bill that made it almost impossible for anyone to sue successfully for racial discrimination. The NAACP warned black people to ‘exercise extreme caution’ before entering Missouri, the first time they’d ever issued a travel warning for a specific state. Eric was now often ...”

“... the source of the story. Denounced by the Daily Mirror’s front page as a ‘liar’, he did not sue or complain. A few months later he was quietly sacked. Thatcher, of course, could not blame her loyal minister for his indiscretion, which coincided so unluckily with her instructions from the White House. Channon had been right, however, about the confidence ...”

“... Carried – because it locates the war in such a full range of social and historical contexts. The black humour which permeates American versions of Vietnam can also function as a means of undermining the reality of the events described: the surreal looniness of it all has been rendered so often and vividly – in books such as Gustav Hasford’s The ...”

“... in education) being misused to attack queer academics, for instance. Complaints against Black students are more likely to lead to expulsion than those against white students. As ever, it is members of stigmatised groups and those in less powerful positions who are most likely to suffer.These observations​ raise a more general worry. Are complaints ...”

“... surrender and the overthrow of the kaiser. ‘Again,’ he later wrote, ‘everything went black before my eyes.’ And so it had all been in vain. In vain all the sacrifices and privations; in vain the hunger and thirst of months which were often endless; in vain the hours in which, with mortal fear clutching at our hearts, we nevertheless did our ...”

“... drawn by Léon during his 30-year search. They were handed down to JMG in his father’s black case ‘in an old cardboard file tied up in string with the particularly vindictive inscription in my aunt’s writing: Worthless Papers’. We board a light plane to Rodrigues, 560 kilometres from Mauritius. There, I find that Anse aux Anglais (known ...”

“... you know that?” “Those cells in my lab have to be hers,” he said. “They’re from a black woman named Henrietta Lacks who died of cervical cancer at Hopkins in the 1950s.”’ Only a few months earlier, Bobbette had read about the Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Male Negro, and had learned that for 40 years the US Public Health ...”

“... press by the mere mention of Carman’s name had led the Telegraph to forget that the dead can’t sue for libel, because as anyone who has frequented the pubs and wine bars around the Temple would confirm, George Carman did not lead a quiet life. In the 1980s and 1990s it was usual to find him on several nights of the week in Daly’s, a wine bar near the ...”

“... to the sea. On the Corniche, Lebanese girls in luminous Lycra shorts rollerbladed past clusters of black monoliths in full hijab pushing buggies. I thought I recognised one of the buildings on the seafront from old black and white photos as the former French restaurant Lucullus, a favourite haunt of Philby’s, famous for ...”

“... on a scholarship to study painting. Soon afterwards, spotted at a New Year’s Eve party wearing black stockings, she was the talk of Carshalton. ‘Well, no one wore black stockings,’ Penrose remembers, ‘so it was “Ahhh”.’Wimbledon, however, was not exciting. The painting department was stuck in a prewar ...”

“... Fleischmann were not just recalibrating their detectors or smoothing out data: they were reporting black as white, and committing a very serious breach of scientific ethics. The pair committed other assaults on conventional scientific procedure. Their blunders are almost enough to evoke sympathy, were it not for the fact that to this day they have not recanted ...”

“... books, as well as beds, were soon being exported as far as the remote and isolated colonies of the Black Sea. And yet the book itself remains, well into the Middle Ages, an oddly approximate item: a string of letters, without word-divisions, with minimal punctuation, it leaves the reader to pick out the words and organise them into sentences. Many readers ...”

“... Hackney neighbour, who kept banging on his door and holding up new-born puppies, threatening to sue him and his mongrel Sid for paternity unless he found them homes. Already ‘stressed out’, it was doubtful that he would be able to get out of bed in time for the morning ceremony. He did.) Of course in not having a white wedding, I was simply following ...”