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“... but an art exhibition or a class in design. The frame fills with colours and lines, gold, green, black, yellow, dusty grey, sharp, blurry, fading. The effect is one of pure abstraction, and very beautiful. This effect remains even when the colours and lines resolve into figures, landscapes, objects. Now we see a river, a meadow, a line of trees, the churning ...”

“... security guard at HMV and abject night-time guitarist, tapping his foot into a pile of blankets, black-and-blue notes whimpering through the floor ... My fingers whiten as they bunch themselves to grip my father’s pen. Silver and surgically thin, taken in error, its ink is thicker than ...”

“... her mystery rucksack and impenetrable wraparounds, her superbly articulated deltoids under the black wife-beater –     to iodine from ...”

“... was sung to open the games. Only Americans – Dennis Mitchell after winning a 100-metres heat and Michael Johnson after taking the 200-metre gold – puffed out their chests and pulled their jerseys to display the national emblem. Only Americans accused an Irish swimmer of using drugs when she won the Olympic gold. Only an eliminated American boxer, Fernando ...”

“... Crassus, whose standards wouldn’t rise on the final day, who came out of his corner in careless black, whose head, when severed, was a day younger than his ...”

“... days, blue snow, time tucked away in cut-out arches, time is blue, time is snow, red sleeves, black hat, time is a yellow woman. Angina days, Swiss, blue Devon, black Cambrium, commedia dell’arte time, slipper red and Silurian red, wall map of England yellow and time. Angina days, blue Kent, time so yellow that none ...”

“... had his life-sized picture in a colour tabloid, though his skin was white, and his blood almost black. It was said the Governor had wanted him dead. A dreadful indifference took me in the room full of Mexican tricolors – the same eagle on the same cactus chewing on the same worm – and in the room of mildly heretical old banknotes, the room with pious ...”

“... Brion Davis’s Inhuman Bondage throws light on the process by which slavery became exclusively black. There were many European precedents for white slavery, not only in the classical period but in the trading networks of the late medieval Mediterranean. The word ‘slave’ derives from sclavus, or Slav, and the vast majority of slaves in Western Europe ...”

“... outlived himself at twenty-six ... There was one day he seemed to catch sunstroke. He fancied the black, scorched beard of a sheik would furnish him with some ‘capital paintbrushes’. Sailing up the Nile, on the Hecate, they spent Christmas Day eating boiled eggs and plum pudding, and playing cards for the captain’s soul. The temples at Luxor stood under ...”

“... with smoke and sights and consommations. The yellow Citröen sits up and fills its lungs, a black and white green-backed mongrel sees us off. The road skirts the airport like a stray runway. Incoming planes make as if to pick us off. Sometimes it divides: one half runs along the ground, the other makes a sudden hump – my fear of flyovers. A little ...”

“... and a coffee-coloured Britain. Tolerance does not require that every Englishman should have a black man for his neighbour or that every Asian should forget his cultural identity. Instead we must acknowledge and understand the existence of social pluralism. It is not surprising that the Times’s Englishman turns out not to include Asians or blacks. What ...”

“... mole on the edge of a wheat field is deceptive. Under it is a rendezvous for beetles, armed and in black. Above it wheels a hawk with ruffled wings, till he veers away. Like sappers at the double, ants dig a trench along the spine. On its inside the wires are glowing, nervous maggots on the ticker tape. From the stomach lining traders in coloured jackets (or ...”

“... Conceived in slavery and dedicated to the proposition that black men are created unequal, the United States has attempted to come to terms with its longue durée of white supremacy only twice in its history. The first effort, made by black and white abolitionists in the period of nationalist expansion, and caught up in the conflict between slave and free labour modes of production, brought hereditary legal servitude to an end ...”

“... the war in Vietnam were slow in coming. Saigon fell in 1975, and Hal Ashby’s Coming Home and Michael Cimino’s The Deer Hunter both date from 1978. Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now was 1979. In their separate ways these films were all about damage done to Americans; any damage done to others was incidental, part of some larger story that wasn’t ...”

“... on a sign at the entrance to a town – Colorado Springs, a place that is about to hire its first black police officer. The pictured times move from the 19th century to the 1950s to the 1970s. We may not have recognised the first shot as coming from Gone with the Wind, but we’ll certainly have picked up the presentation of the American South and the Civil ...”