“... plays. The characters take their time, set everything out with the utmost elaboration. Here is Clifford advising Henry VI against unnatural exhibitions of mercy: To whom do lions cast their gentle looks? Not to the beast that would usurp their den. Whose hand is that the forest bear doth lick? Not his that spoils her young before her face. Who scapes the ...”

“... 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 could sustain a man once he left his father’s house.’With what he called his ‘anthropological eye’, Wilson set out to dramatise the ‘dazed and dazzling … rapport with ...”

“... one imagines, by John Bayley, whose efforts on behalf of his late wife and her reputation make Max Clifford seem timid and retiring. One lesson of this deplorable business is never to sanction the shooting of any video, however lofty its purpose, because once shot it will be shown. Professor Hodges seems to have arrived at his diagnosis of Alzheimer’s ...”

“... paintings were usually found on Ballantine mass-market paperbacks by Isaac Asimov, Frederik Pohl, Clifford Simak and others. Powers’s designs screamed of the ‘paraliterary’, of druggy, trippy, sci-fi – just the boy’s cup of tea. The other two dust jackets – for The Futurological Congress and The Cyberiad – were more restrained, looking like ...”

“... the allotted Uncle Tom role. This is why a young black woman identified with Marilyn Monroe. James Baldwin identified with her too, as he told Weatherby when he was introduced to him by Tennessee Williams. Not that Weatherby was the only writer on Monroe to spot these moments of what might seem like odd affinity. Lee Strasberg’s ...”