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“... silver necklace I bought her (out of the death grants) as a parting gift; and on her body the black silk moiré dress she bought in Fenwick Street on that same trip to London. Sleeveless, and dropping to just below the knee, it shows me (and the faculty) the curve and bulk of her buttocks, her almost not quite large enough breasts. For all the sun and the ...”

“... or a TV dinner. Handled and unhandled jars appear up and down, left and right. There is a deep black panel in the top centre, but the overall effect of the piece is light, a bewildering jostle of information. The European pictures can be just as lovely. I hadn’t known Café by the Lake (1913), hard to read but irresistible, laid out again in verticals ...”

“... and all, Dupea is, at the start of the story, at home in a flimsy apartment with Rayette (Karen Black), a waitress at a diner. She is as devoted to Tammy Wynette as he is alienated from Chopin, although we don’t know about the Chopin bit yet. Black gets pregnant. Nicholson expresses his displeasure to his workmate Elton ...”

“... Sarabande, haven’t done poet or translator any favours with their cover (a creepy-looking black and white caricature of Tranströmer with curly-wurly writing that appears to promise a graphic novel within, and the words ‘Bright Scythe’ like a blue parrot along one shoulder), the odd title (a celebration of death?) or the book itself as an ...”

“... turned to Zuckerman and to the young men in the PUS’s secretariat: figures like Frank Cooper and Michael Quinlan, who were themselves to become powerful Permanent Secretaries in the course of time. Financial stringency meant that the high-spending Services once more had to turn their fire on one another, and the Navy and the RAF battled, with a desperation ...”

“... thumb. She shows it to us, held between her toes. The movie is shot by Bruno Delbonnel in black and white, but its dominant colour is a very pale grey. The witch speaks, as the witches in Macbeth always do, of ‘fog and filthy air’, and we see a filthy screen straight away, with two birds faintly discernible in the fog, hovering as if in an air ...”

“... great moment also involves Augie, but more centrally. He leaves the Technicolor film set for the black and white backstage of a theatre, and then steps out onto a balcony in a narrow city street: a theatre district somewhere, plenty of neon lights in the background. This is as close as any movie is going to get to a certain kind of realism, presenting a true ...”

“... but only after a six-minute period where it seems unlikely to begin at all. We looked at a black screen, listened to heavy, ghostly, synthesised sound with no sense of voices or instruments in it. As time went by, I wondered if this was a technical glitch of some kind, having experienced such events more than once in the same cinema. There is a similar ...”

“... visiting various moments in her past and getting rid of lingering loads of feeling. Dressed in a black leather suit, she lies in a tub of liquid, receives an injection in her ear and takes off into the past. The soirée we attended was part of the first of her trips.Let’s look at some of this more closely. Periodically we return to the tub of liquid or the ...”

“... Altaforte’, the old troubadour Bertran de Born – with his ‘whoreson dogs’ and ‘hell blot black’ – is as alive as any written character can be, and more alive than many of Pound’s actual contemporaries. But what about some of the parallel or related questions? When do we dig up the dead, and how? Can they be robbed? What if their deadness is ...”

“... Alexander reminded me that Black once said that he was prepared to let his editors have a completely free hand except on one subject. He forbade attacks on American Presidents in general and President Reagan in particular. Entry for 18 April 1986, Not Many Dead The success of Michael Moore’s film about Roger Smith and General Motors has aroused an envious spirit of emulation in my breast ...”

“... Hull. His loss isn’t the only topic in Matthew’s poems, or in the poems of his twin brother, Michael, but it is one for which both poets are known – widely known, in the US, as poets go. They have now been introduced to the UK in an unusually designed volume: Brother (Faber, £10.99) contains ten of Michael’s and ...”

“... Practitioners of the black arts of journalism will universally acknowledge that the most accurate as well as the funniest portrayal of their profession is Evelyn Waugh’s novel, Scoop. No one who has ever worked for a paper with a baronial proprietor could fail to recognise Lord Copper and his bevvy of fawning executives ...”

“... starving children of Ethiopia, on the other the wheeler-dealers of the international markets, the Michael Milkens and their hundred million dollar salaries. Michael Lewis deals wittily with the bizarre and shameless world of the wealthy bond-dealers in Liar’s Poker. In Lords of Poverty Graham Hancock looks at the other ...”

“... but there has been little comparable debate in the UK. Only with the growth of a significant Black population in Britain in the second half of the 20th century has the question of slavery and its legacies been brought into public view. The children of the Windrush wanted to know their history. Establishing it has not been easy, but mainstream accounts ...”