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“... The smell of fleeces comes up to us, acrid. The men follow, in their blue linen coats and high black felt hats, and their sticks fall with a thud on the woolly backs. Oh. The sun is hot and high … a child passes, beating up his flock of lambs and kids, – youth put in charge of youth. Oh. And then a fresh shower of sheep and goats, animated ...”

“... a self-centred one at that. (When Ellen Terry suggested that she might defy convention and wear black rather than white in Ophelia’s mad scene, it was pointed out to her that only one character wore black in Hamlet, and it wasn’t Ophelia.) As a manager, he was dictatorial in rehearsals, favoured state censorship but ...”

“... The dodgy world of the Ulster ‘security forces’, which combines the Orange card with the black-bag operation, has acted like a hothouse for corner-cutting dirty-tricks types, death-squad penis-enviers and all the other banana republic heavies who were later turned against working men and women on the mainland. Sir Kenneth Newman was perhaps ...”

“... tactics against dissent. There was the parallel side-tracking and repression of the burgeoning black civil rights movement, which had always been close to Macdonald’s heart. From the very earliest days of the conflict, he pushed his increasingly Falstaffian form into the front rank of opposition and was more than ready to face trial and imprisonment as ...”

“... argument. First, we have Booth’s colour-coded map of London (gold for wealthy districts, black for poor), in which the social classes are often separated only by the width of a street or a block. Alongside Booth, we have Moretti’s cartography of the fictional city, as represented, for instance, by that quintessentially 19th-century genre, the ...”

“... matters of marital misery with dignity and delicacy. He shows for how long the marriage was not as black as the lugubrious relishers liked to paint it (both Bertrand Russell and Virginia Woolf were impure witnesses for the prosecution), and he shows too that there was often a sportive collusion, easily misconstrued, between Eliot and his first wife. The ...”

“... Berryman in his verse from The Dream Songs onward. The funny voices, the slang, the mugging in black-face, are Berryman’s versions of the Poundian persona. This technique, rather than anything Winters may have had in mind, provides him with a sustaining discipline and allows him his most eloquent and moving expression. It is only in the very late ...”

“... a family inheritance which is at once an uncanny facial resemblance, poetry, and wild blood. The black blood of the Tennysons, you might think of murmuring, except that James Clarence Mangan was secured neither within the laureateship nor within genius. The first explicit allusion, half a dozen pages into the novel, comes when Jamie reflects from ...”

“... mainly of a list of his dislikes, which included (I quote from Polizzotti’s account): ‘black women (too prone to having babies, he felt), women who didn’t speak French, women who farted in his presence’. He also treated the group to his enlightened view of sexual partnership: ‘If I desire a woman, it doesn’t matter to me whether she comes ...”

“... message from outer space in a top-secret complex in an unnamed distant country – are broadly black-farcical. The impression they leave is of a handful of brilliantly managed sketches spliced together with jump-cuts and ominous spacey reveries. In some ways, the middle-period novels that made him famous do the same, only better: White Noise (1985) is a ...”

“... who claims to remember him from boarding school, and starts an affair with Canning’s beautiful black wife. Carefully written and dutifully plotted, these novels contain enough hot-country gloom to hint at larger worries than local politics, and borrow enough from such models as Graham Greene to make non-South African readers feel at home. The Good Doctor ...”

“... thread by which it was unpicked, even the name ‘Watergate’ has become inadequate. Yet if one black nightwatchman had not noticed signs of forcible entry in that hideous condo on the Potomac (where the hapless Democrats had so typically sited their campaign HQ), and had not decided to raise the alarm, it is terrifying to think how ignorant we would now be ...”

“... as different as the poetry of Carol Ann Duffy, Kate Clanchy or David Kinloch, and the fiction of Christopher Whyte or A.L. Kennedy. Some of these poets and novelists are wary of each other. Jamie recently refused to read with Irvine Welsh because of what she saw as the misogyny of one of his short stories. Yet even such wariness reinforces a sense that these ...”

“... infused with irony and paradox. That he should so heavily and sarcastically miss the point of a black joke is a sorry thing. And note the leaden, ordinary prose. (‘Chain of events’ is a cliché, and you can’t easily have a chain of any sort ‘set in motion’.) Not only is O’Brien being crass here, he is also being reactionary. He sounds like one ...”

“... of Prussia was unknown; and in order that he might rob a neighbour whom he had promised to defend, black men fought on the coast of Coromandel, and red men scalped each other by the Great Lakes of North America.’ ‘Evil’? ‘Wickedness’? The ability to employ these terms without awkwardness or embarrassment has declined, while the capacity of modern ...”