“... Benjamin​ Moser begins his biography with a bang: ‘Susan Sontag was America’s last great literary star.’ In my gaudier moments I prefer to think of Sontag as American literature’s first and last great screen star. Transcending staid text, she was projected into the avid imaginations of legions of onlookers who didn’t know Walter Benjamin from Walter Brennan ...”

“... shoulders fearfully. No cars or cabs, but police are everywhere. In the distance I see a huge black blob disfiguring the sky. Maybe a thunderstorm’s brewing? I step in front of a fleeing office worker: ‘Excuse me, but has something happened?’ His answer comes out as barely comprehensible comic-book babble: ‘The World Trade Center has been hit ...”

“... Benjamins’, in the words of the Minnesota congresswoman Ilhan Omar ($100 bills have a picture of Benjamin Franklin), the old guard is much better funded. But the younger, dissenting wing of the party is more energetic, and closer to the base: of the Democrats running for president, only Cory Booker, a senator from New Jersey, spoke at the most recent ...”

“... are too derivative, but recognisably Auster. In the second play, the characters, called Green, Black and Blue, pre-empt the Blue, Black, Brown and White of his Ghosts, the second volume of the NY Trilogy, itself far in advance of the sinister rainbow alliance in Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs. In the third play, the Auster ...”

“... to light on a good read for the plane, his eye is assaulted by a thwacking array of swastikas on black, gold and blood-red fields. Approaching them at random but with a certain circumspection, he finds, for example, Philippe van Rindt’s The Trial of Adolf Hitler, in which it is revealed that Hitler survived his attempts at suicide in the bunker; The Murder ...”

“... truth about a father who turns out to have been a maritally entangled commercial traveller and the black sheep of a respectable Glasgow family. Bundling up her infant, Janet withdrew from Blairgowrie to the Spittal of Glenshee, where she rented a cottage. Neat treats this as a passage between opposed cultures and inheritances: from mean-spirited middle-class ...”

“... Trump’s resounding success later that year takes the same granular approach to show Hispanic and Black votes falling away from the Democratic Party, whose ‘triumph at the scale of 1992 or 2008 – never mind 1936 or 1964 – is no longer conceivable’. In general, though, NLR is immune to the appeal of actually existing electoral democracy and sceptical ...”

“... John Goodman and Sean Penn have all grappled with the Kingfish – Long’s nickname, after a black character on the radio show Amos ’n’ Andy who manipulated and cajoled his associates into various exploits. Randy Newman recorded two songs about him in 1974: ‘Kingfish’ and ‘Every Man a King’. Work on Long has attracted a number of prizes ...”

“... make it seem as if it had been intentional.’ (Anna Karenina) ‘He pulled down over his eyes a black straw hat the brim of which he extended with his hand held out over it like an eye-shade, as though to see whether someone was coming at last, made the perfunctory gesture of annoyance by which people mean to show that they have waited long enough, although ...”

“... nearly every mention of knife crime in the rest of the national press was in connection with young Black people in London.According to Home Office data, almost half of all homicides in England and Wales are ‘drug-related’, but this is a very broad definition: recent analysis by Vice News found that it includes incidents in which those involved had been ...”

“... How to be black in America was the challenge for spirited young men of colour who found their way to Harlem in the troubled years of the 1940s, when music, poetry, dance and art were giving way to drink, drugs, street crime and sex for money. Malcolm Little’s first impulse was to cut loose in the big city where he found himself soon after his 17th birthday in 1942 ...”

“... appearing again and again as touchstones, and he was cautionary in response to his friend Walter Benjamin’s views on the utopian potential to be found in cinema, radio and advertising. In a letter he wrote to Benjamin in August 1936, Adorno defines his own position as being where the extremes of art – the very ...”

“... had large numbers of slaves. By mid-century about 40 per cent of population of Virginia was black. Who then bought the convicts? The answer seems to be middling planters who could not afford the increasingly expensive African slaves and who therefore were willing to accept even a convict in hope of obtaining seven years of hard labour in return for an ...”

“... family have for you,’ reads the typing primer; you can see it in cross-stitches, can’t you? Benjamin Franklin would be proud. ‘It’s easy to be clean on the outside,’ murmurs a demonic Shirley Temple in baggy shorts and lanyard. ‘All you need is soap and water and a scrubbing brush. It’s much harder to be clean on the inside.’ Among all this ...”

“... he evidently never wore a wig – dressed in what appears to be his customary suit of solemn black, but with a plain, reddish-brown greatcoat. As Einberg puts it, he ‘eschews any aggrandisement of his own person, either by conventional gesture or dress’. There is, to borrow Hallett’s terms again, a striking combination of benevolence and especially ...”