“... who always seemed to be standing in the bushes when I left the house, and an obese one-eyed black cat, who used to come in through my bedroom window. It had one green eye and one empty socket, and the minute it saw me with its single eye, it would start running from room to room, uttering piercing meows and crashing into the furniture. There was a lot ...”

“... the vision it had when it came to power – that were manifestly failing those citizens, mainly black, who were most socially vulnerable. In fact, the writing had been on the wall for Calata since February 2014, when, following Zuma’s annual state of the nation address, he was grabbed by the scruff of his jacket by SABC’s head of news, Jimi ...”

“... crisis at this period. Even if we take his word for it that Breakfast of Champions, despite its black themes, betokened recovery, and a psychic breakfasting, by Vonnegut the man, it is evident that Vonnegut the novelist was not at ease. He puts himself into the story – which is an oddity in his fiction – and has himself saying: ‘this is a very bad ...”

“... theatrical literature. In its ambition and achievement, Wilson’s Herculean endeavour outdid even Eugene O’Neill, who completed only two of his projected eleven-play cycle. ‘I took it as my credo,’ Wilson wrote, ‘and sought to answer James Baldwin’s call for a profound articulation of the Black tradition that ...”

“... Village with sundry trendies and their visitors – Alfred Stieglitz, Edna St Vincent Millay, Eugene O’Neill and Marcel Duchamp, among others. She was connected with the Provincetown Players and the Little Review. She had affairs with decadents of both sexes, she wrote about their lives and their haunts in newspapers and published interviews with ...”

“... so unreliable and bewildering as to be next to useless. Niedecker spent nearly all of her life on Black Hawk Island, three miles from Fort Atkinson, a town in the rich dairy country of south-central Wisconsin with a population of around eight thousand. The state capital, Madison, is 34 miles north-west and Milwaukee about 60 miles ...”

“... them in a biscuit tin to his father for safekeeping. There were the three years he spent in the Black Forest as a prisoner of war, and the attempts he made to escape. (The third was successful.) There was the aftermath of occupation, and the Liberation he recorded as a sequence of razed buildings, wrecked lives and ghostly rooms. In 1947, two things ...”

“... virgin territory. The space had once been a community art venture called King Ubu, operated by the Black Mountain poet Robert Duncan and his collagist partner Jess Collins. Duncan, removing his clothes at the conclusion of his verse play Faust Foutu, in order to demonstrate the meaning of nakedness, anticipated by a decade or so the Ginsberg party trick that ...”

“... or up to, a given future date. As I described in the LRB on 13 April 2000, the economists Fischer Black, Myron Scholes and Robert Merton drew on the log-normal distribution (and on a number of other assumptions about market conditions) to reduce the complicated problem of understanding the prices of options to a relatively simple differential equation. The ...”

“... protect the barrel, attachments for flashlights and other accoutrements. Originally, the AR-15 was black – hence its Vietnam-era nickname, ‘black rifle’ – but now it comes in a variety of colours and designs, from ‘polished lime’ to Stars-and-Stripes to Hello Kitty. It has been called the ‘Barbie doll of ...”

“... a Cape Town academic, reaches a similar conclusion when his daughter Lucy is gang-raped by three black men at her isolated homestead in the Eastern Cape. ‘But why did they hate me so?’ Lucy asks. ‘I had never set eyes on them.’ ‘It was history speaking through them,’ her father replies. ‘A history of wrong. Think of it that way, if it helps. It ...”

“... for War, had the affair with Christine Keeler at Ward’s flat. Keeler was also consorting with Eugene Ivanov, the vodka-loving Soviet Naval Attaché, who was having great success in London society and who was also a friend of Ward. Profumo denied the liaison in the House of Commons, admitted it three months later and resigned. Incredible rumours of sex ...”

“... that his letters would eventually become so many ‘arrows returned against him’. But this black thought did not slow him down, because the iller and more unvisitable he became the more letters he wrote: the later volumes in Kolb’s series are fatter by many pages than the earlier ones. In theory, Proust told Jacques Rivière (in a letter), he was un ...”

“... have recognised her Russians, starting with the first one she met, her violin teacher: Maxim wore black turtlenecks, played a mellow-toned, orange-coloured violin, and produced an impression of being deeply absorbed by considerations and calculations beyond the normal range of human cognition. Towards the end of one lesson, for example, he told me that he had ...”

“... an auctioneer, and Evelyn, a seamstress turned dress-shop owner. Evelyn was Irish; Albert a former Black and Tan. Carman despised his father and doted on his perfectionist mother, who thought the world of him. They shared an obsession with cleanliness and most of all with success. In response to sustained pressure from Evelyn to come first in everything he ...”