Regardless of whether white Britons cared how black immigrants from British colonies referred to them in 1956, Colin MacInnes was keen to tell them.

Eight years after the Empire Windrush brought that first wave of Caribbean migrants to Tilbury Docks, his essay, “A Short Guide For Jumbles (to the Life of their Coloured Brethren in England)”, revealed that the “Jumble” of the title was a corruption of “John Bull”, used by West Africans to describe Englishmen “in a spirit of tolerant disdain”.

In his eagerness to enlighten the Jumble, the author seemed to be inadvertently confirming certain fallacies, as well as stereotyping both blacks and whites to a risible degree. He wrote: “What most differentiates the African from the Englishman is that our chief ambition is to put our lives into a savings bank, whilst he firmly believes that every day is there to be enjoyed.”

When MacInnes died, aged 61, in 1976, the obituary in the New York Times — a newspaper he contributed to along with British ma…

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In the 2017 documentary, Joan Didion: The Centre Will Not Hold, Didion, the subject of the film, gives a telling response to a question from director Griffin Dunne, her nephew.

She recounts scenes she and her husband, John Gregory Dunne, witnessed after they returned to her native California in 1964 from New York, where Didion had spent eight years writing for Vogue. The couple settled in a California vastly different from the Sacramento of Didion’s childhood. They were at the epicentre of a mutinous counterculture and, according to Didion, ‘participated in the paranoia of the time’. Housed in a ropey corner of Hollywood, they hosted parties that attracted the beautiful people, but remained too disciplined themselves to indulge in the excesses that took out many of the celebrities they entertained. Each morning Didion slipped on her sunglasses, sipped an ice cold Coke for breakfast, and started writing.

In Dunne’s documentary, she recalls a visit to the Haight-Ashbury neighbourhood in S…

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Pedro Almodóvar once informed an interviewer that the word ‘camp’ does not exist in his native Spain.

It’s a term that international critics used to describe his early films, while lauding the director and applauding the nerve of his risky vision. In some quarters the plaudits were so elaborate they too carried a touch of camp: ‘In terms of dramatic creativity there are three Spanish icons Cervantes, Lorca and Almodóvar.’ Following the breakthrough success of the Oscar-nominated ‘Women On The Verge of A Nervous Breakdown’ in 1988, the word ‘Almodóvarian’ was coined to summarise the signature style of his films: sardonic comedy, melodrama, shock tactics and garish sets. The heightened style was inspired by the golden age of technicolour that captivated him as a child, with a touch of the Memphis group’s design output when it came to those sets. Homosexuality was obligatory; transexuals a staple from his early short ‘Sex Goes, Sex Comes’ (1980). ‘In the ‘80s, when my movies were particu…

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A television production company once offered me the opportunity to black up for money, by repeating the experiment that brought John Howard Griffin to prominence with the book, Black Like Me, published in 1961.

In 1959, Griffin started documenting his sojourn throughout the segregated southern states of America, while Jim Crow laws were still enforced, and with evidential prejudice a common occurrence for black Americans. Griffin was a white man who darkened his skin – with the aid of the drug methoxsalen – to temporarily experience life as a black man. His account became a magazine article, and later Black Like Me, which took its title from a line in a poem by Langston Hughes.

Had I taken up the offer, I would have been filmed in the north of England living with a black family, recording the ‘low level’ racism I was expected to encounter before returning, along with my natural pigmentation, to compare experiences.

My agent suggested the insurance premium would be extortionate. Had I ser…

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By the time the veteran journalist Christopher Booker died in 2019, he had witnessed enough of the twenty-first century to notice how much his book on the 1960s (The Neophiliacs, published in 1969) resonated with it.

Two years into this decade, it’s become apparent to others, too, that there are striking parallels between the themes highlighted in his critique of the 1960s and social trends that test us in the present.

“In order to become mature, in short, we must not only reject the authority of our parents — but, at the same time, in order to replace them, we must also learn to kill off our own fantasy selves”, Booker, in Jungian mode, wrote. “Only by killing this fantasy self can a man become fully mature. Unless he does so, he is still in a state of rebellion, a perpetual state of immaturity.”

He was referring to the reputed revolution that occurred in the 1960s (which he dated to beginning in 1954). It was a conflict between the young and the old; the past and the present. It was at…

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