“... set in: Civil Rights, Vietnam and the Sixties. Liberals found themselves suddenly outflanked by black activists and student radicals, and the liberal consensus dissolved in acrimony. By the Reagan years, ‘liberalism’ had become a synonym for moral permissiveness and to run as a liberal was to court electoral suicide anywhere outside Manhattan or San ...”

“... has been touted as a film noir, or at least as a homage to film noir, but it’s about as black as The Sound of Music; it has amiability written all over it. A call-girl agency in the movie is called Fleur de Lys, its motto ‘Whatever you desire’, and that might be the movie’s motto too. Do we want slinky whores who resemble movie stars, all ...”

“... movement. Caliban is an aesthetic object rather than a monster or an abused slave, and his mixed black and white make-up suggests ballet rather than the movies. And as almost always in modern versions of Shakespeare, whether on film or on stage, the comedians aren’t funny, they are just doing their best to represent what they (and their director) imagine ...”

“... after the Treaty of Versailles Shakespeare’s second homeland seemed once again to be sulking in black at the centre of the European stage, pining for decisive action. The Nazis believed Germany had to shake off the role of Hamlet in favour of becoming Fortinbras, freeing the national spirit from Shakespearean tragedy in the process. According to Hermann ...”

“... The title​ of Michael Moorcock’s novel Byzantium Endures, published in 1981, captures with one verb the conventional picture of a whole civilisation. Byzantium’s antiquity and grandeur are timeless and static – Yeats’s ‘monuments of unaging intellect’. The future lies elsewhere, in the rise of a West from which Byzantium is excluded ...”

“... each other, except style: sly, fake-lazy, apparently frivolous in the case of Washington, a clever black guy playing other people’s idea of a not so bright black guy; and brisk, smooth and bitchy in the case of Foster, everyone’s idea of what power would look like if women had it. There is some kind of metaphor in the ...”

“... A girl falling for her cousin’s older husband is described like this: ‘An imprecise black pigtail dangled between her hunched shoulders.’ What isn’t inherent in that description? The uncertainty, the unreadiness, the defensiveness and fluster, the feeling of being trapped, of awaiting the permission to be attractive, the inevitability of a ...”

“... In the fall of 2002, in the company of a dog named Charlie Chaplin and an architect named Michael Meredith, I set out to drive a 1960 Chevy Apache 10 pick-up truck, at 45 mph, from far west Texas to New York City: 2364 miles through desert, suburbs, forests, lake-spattered plains, mountains, farmland, more suburbs and the Holland Tunnel ...”

“... was equal parts Old Hollywood and Brancusi mask, Lisa Marie was famous for her relationships with Michael Jackson and Nicolas Cage – and for being Elvis’s daughter. Before her death, in 2023, of cardiac arrest caused by complications from weight-loss surgery, she had been recording tapes of material for a memoir. These recordings form the basis of From ...”

“... and jazz trombonist turned preacher, and Bliss, a boy of mysterious parentage raised in the black church, who has fled North, passed as white, and become Adam Sunraider, the racist New England Senator. As Callahan has put it together, the novel begins with the failed effort of Hickman and his flock to warn Sunraider that a young ...”

“... inconclusive experiments with the more extreme evidences of perversion’, and bought his first black leather jacket. ‘I’m not sure what it meant to me,’ he said of the jacket: ‘I couldn’t say. I thought I was the only pervert in the world.’ After all this, he wrote in the summer of 1956, ‘San Francisco seems a let down.’ The first dedicated ...”

“... fancy and throws out a verdict reached after calm deliberation by a jury of you honest citizens black folk and white, right there in the Fourteenth Amendment in black and white, the jury that’s the bulwark and cornerstone of American justice like you don’t see in these dictator atheist countries. And it’s not just ...”

“... famous studies of movement. She mentions that no one took the trouble to remember the name of the black jockey riding the horse, who was her and OJ’s grandfather several times removed.OJ loves the horses and hates the fact that he has to sell them. He thinks he understands them and he may be right. But then the whole film, as its opening suggests, is about ...”

“... gauge throughout the film adds to this effect. The movie is in colour but it feels as if it’s in black and white, and this impression continues even as we recognise that we are (mentally or materially) in a cinema that’s still open.A good example of the other effect is the fate of a jigsaw puzzle the wife (Chloe Maayan) of the leading character (Zhu ...”

“... of Philadelphia Fire is the shock named in the title, the burning and bombing, on the orders of a black mayor, of a black community in a house on Osage Avenue. The event is briefly recalled in The Cattle Killing. There the shock takes several other forms as well: what we might call the invention of race by 18th-century ...”