Foreigners

A powerful and affecting new book from Caryl Phillips: a hybrid of reportage, fiction, and historical fact that tells the stories of three black men whose lives speak resoundingly to the place and role of the foreigner in English society," "Francis Barber, "given" to the great eighteenth-century writer Samuel Johnson, more companion than servant, afforded an unusual depth of freedom that, after Johnson's death, hastened his wretched demise ... Randolph Turpin, who made history in 1951 by defeating Sugar Ray Robinson, becoming Britain's first black world-champion boxer, a top-class fighter for…