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“... flowing nearby or the adjacent ocean. Those born in a country of such intense heat are mostly black in colour. It is said that they are no different in human nature, being kindly and compassionate.’ This would be an unusually enlightened opinion even today in one of the most racially conscious countries in the world. The public curiosity for foreign ...”

“... standing, clutching a cup of coffee and trying to read Anthony Powell: A Life, the book with the black and white photo of a grumpy man in tweeds on the cover. How Powell would have hated it, I thought, while squatting; all of us going about our little lives in the cramped, blue-upholstered domestic departure lounges of this world. For like most people with ...”

“... and also Bob Wootton, the replacement guitarist for Luther Perkins and the driver of Cash’s big black tour bus, in which he criss-crossed America, playing stadiums and theatres and festivals and just about anywhere that would have him, week in, week out, year in, year out. Cash laboured hard for his help; he’d come a long way for a share-cropper’s son ...”

“... is a panther stalks me down’), claiming that he, too, was pursued. In ‘Black Coat’ he responds sharply to Plath’s ‘Man in Black’ (‘I had no idea I had stepped/ Into the telescopic sights/Of the paparazzo sniper/Nested in your brown iris’). The list goes on: a prosaic ...”

“... Some languages will have only a few names for colours, but if there are three, they will be black, white and red. If four, add yellow or green, if five, both of those. In all there are, by successive addition in a definite sequence, about eleven basic colours. After being sophomorically bowled over by Whorf, I was bowled over by Berlin and Kay. How was ...”

“... sashayed over to his wardrobe, and navigated my way across the sea of footwear to his black Pierre Cardin alligator-skin shoes I’d secretly always had my eye on.’) Like so many Soho lives, Bernie’s ended badly, by his own hand, but he was a prize. He would sort anybody out with a drink or out of a spot, and it’s impossible to remember his ...”

“... My art​ is formalist,’ Frank Bowling wrote in 1988, ‘and my experience is that of a black artist.’ What might appear an opposition between formalist concerns and lived experience has proved, for Bowling, a powerful dualism. His current retrospective at Tate Britain (until 26 August) is his first at a British gallery ...”

“... of who she is and what she wants. The walking holiday she and her husband have planned now seems, Ian McEwan says, ‘a pointless detour from her uncertainty’. The phrase is full of trouble, of precise and elusive implications. Uncertainty is a path, a destination, a need. Of course we may not like the thought, and many of us will prefer to see our detours ...”

“... We owe a large debt to the famous chapter on Robinson Crusoe in Ian Watt’s The Rise of the Novel. Watt really made us use our wits about that novel and forced us to relate it to our most serious interests. Reread after twenty years, moreover, the chapter still has all of its intellectual impact and verve. The trouble is, I now find myself wanting to quarrel with almost every sentence in it ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... that he has deprived his children of their sense of place. His book, From the Sin-é Café to the Black Hills: Notes on the New Irish, includes criticism, personal essays and even a piece of fiction. Wall says his book is a hybrid because he is one, too. His interest is in the points at which Irish and Irish-American culture intersect and his study shows the ...”

“... two weeks I lay in the neurosurgery ward. My head hurt like hell and my right arm had large blue-black bruises on it where the Sisters of Mercy injected painkillers. In the public ward with me were survivors of motorcycle crashes and victims of brain tumours and assault. A young Tunisian called Mustah had been attacked with a hammer; a great scar like a ...”

“... after the children of visiting African students: he describes the babies in their care as ‘fat black pickaninnies . . . like noble animals’. On a bus he sees ‘strange Lithuanian or Slav men’ who are ‘ominously, coarsely brutal’. At a tutorial at Oxford he notes of a fellow student: ‘He comes almost exactly in the "little man” category of ...”

“... We all have flickering memories of television programmes glimpsed or devoured on our parents’ black and white TVs. Two in particular have stayed with me for more than five decades. First of all there was The Singing Ringing Tree, which I must have seen on one of its first BBC broadcasts in the mid-1960s. Subsequent DVD releases have revealed that, in its ...”

“... newspaper, but whom one had long since assumed to be dead. Most were pressing curious sticks like black lollipops against their ears. These turned out to be one of the few tangible reforms introduced since Bagehot’s day – hearing aids. They were not available in the press gallery, however, so I could only assume that the wispy figure making faint quacking ...”