I resented his social quietism: the fact that he went along with her project for us without complaint, and that he tolerated the way he was patronized by the men he drank with

out of the most far-fetched farrago of ‘facts’, images and expectations from diverse and myth-driven sources

They were voluble, excitable, high-spirited, quarrelsome, truculent and aggressive. Not like ‘us’ at all.

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

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

The degree to which new cultural forms transfigured and expanded the ambit of politics itself was perhaps the dominating issue which possessed us