1. It is overdone, cartoonish in places, but what is hard to miss is its anger and envy, channelled through Irie.

2. It was at Melbourne University, in the Parkville area, where Hill trained Dominic Johnson and Irie Hill (Warren’s wife) to bronze–winning efforts in the pole vault at the Manchester Commonwealth Games.

3. Hitherto he‘s always had collaborators and creative foils: bandmates Tom Morley and Nial Jinks in the original Scritti Politti, whose fractured postpunk was exhumed for last year‘s Early compilation; David Gamson and Fred Maher with the hit machine Scritti of Cupid & Psyche 85; dancehall ragga stars Shabba Ranks and Sweetie Irie on the brace of 1''0 singles that turned out to be Scritti‘s last hits; and a raft of New York rap MCs on 1'''‘s not–quite–a–comeback Anomie & Bonhomie.

4. All they would see is the equivalent of logarithms in literature." Replying to Wood she concluded "it‘s all laughter in the dark – the title of a Nabokov novel and still the best term for the kind of writing I aspire to÷ not a division of head and heart, but the useful employment of both." White Teeth takes Archie, 47, middle–aged, washed–up, just returned from the brink of suicide; Clara, 1', Jamaican ex–Jehovah‘s Witness; their daughter Irie; Archie‘s best friend Samad, a Bengali refugee, also married to a woman far younger, Alsana; and their twins, Millat and Majid, mixes them up in a tale of cloning, animal rights, race, Islamic and Christian fundamentalism, and rumours of the end of the world, and places them in Willesden, northwest London, where Smith grew up.