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Film was already one of my abiding passions. It seemed to me the most innovative of the modern arts. I had always had a passionate addiction to the movies, and as a youth in Kingston I saw on Saturday afternoon matinees at the Carib Theatre everything from Hollywood that found its way to Jamaica: w…

‘How can you be interested in Henry James?’ Edward Thompson – the historian E. P. Thompson – once admonished me, with exasperation. ‘Ah!’ I thought to myself. But what about his sensitivity to the little deceptions and evasions of the English which one finds in his works, and the complex dialectic …

His ‘test’ swept aside all the necessary ambivalence in play, reducing one’s allegiance to a sporting team to a catechism of national faith

At the same time I learned that my chances were not high of being a first-rate scholar of English literature with a potential Oxbridge academic future, remote as that had always been. It’s not that I wished for this, or that it was something I was planning or wanted. Not because I wasn’t clever eno…

The riots marked a sharp caesura in the lives of Caribbean migrants to Britain