Search Results

“... or wrote but never finished, with fantastic, phantom, harpooning titles like In Ballast to the White Sea, La Mordida, Swinging the Maelstrom. All these things – books, changed circumstances, surgery – are cures of one sort or another, for as Stephen Spender remarked in his introduction to Under the Volcano, ‘with Lowry one is never far away from the ...”

“... shock takes several other forms as well: what we might call the invention of race by 18th-century white American Christians, who one day decided to segregate their formerly unsegregated churches; racial slurs and allegations flung about during the plague; the murder of a mixed-race couple in the Pennsylvania countryside; and across the sea in South ...”

“... There’s a home movie, it seems, of the author in infancy, a sessile toddler, ‘huge and white on the just-turned plot./An early grinning vegetable/sprung up overnight, feeding/methodically, in fistfuls’ – she is doing what it says in the title. With grave charm, Solie worries ‘at the wisdom/of this documentary, its complicity/in my vice, where ...”

“... Dymaxion car, a paramecium-shaped tricycle with a Ford V8 engine. Beside it, a black and white video showed the Dymaxion car slinking past a row of box-like Depression-era Fords and sidling with UFO-like ease into a parking space its own exact size. Fuller intended to add what he called ‘jet stilts’ to the vehicle someday, so it could fly, but ...”

“... English Department at the Bath Academy of Art, he appeared in his own play for children wearing white tights and with gold sequins on his upper eyelids, right into middle age. Swinburne had a sympathetic line or two for androgynes: Love stands upon thy left hand and thy right,   Yet by no sunset and by no moonrise   Shall make thee man and ease a ...”

“... pathetic you were in cheesecloth he’d green shades I could scream still the Society of Jesus White Fathers it’s invisible as that day the same day she and me we made a heavy pretence of love I mean we’d a drunken fuck in the afternoon after a dockland lunch the Land of Green Ginger its smell of sex herrings desire             ‘Sure ...”

“... for clemency awaited his decision. Among the applicants, it is reported, were Conrad Black; Michael Milken, of junk bond fame; John Walker Lindh, the ‘American Taliban’; a former Republican congressman jailed for accepting bribes; and a former Democratic governor of Louisiana, convicted on racketeering charges. They were doomed to ...”

“... as they gallop into an isolated alpine monastery: ‘Put these on and sing.’ ‘These’ are the white habits of a monk and a rosary each. The list of stars in the film (Jeff Goldblum, Bill Murray, Owen Wilson, Edward Norton, all the others mentioned elsewhere in this piece) is a clue to what we are watching. They are all themselves, bringing with them the ...”

“... place he is kept allows for one of the two wonderful set-pieces in the film. It’s a hospital so white you have to keep thinking of Hope’s teeth, and Doc, following a sketchy clue or two, is pretending to be a future investor. He’s shown around by an unctuous doctor, sees a man with a swastika on his face (no, it’s a sign of peace, his guide says), and ...”

“... world. The film itself seems to have forgotten everything except this man on a bike, an ageing white-haired gent imitating a 1950s American icon – think Marlon Brando in The Wild One. Next it’s Freddie’s turn. He is to choose a point in the far distance, focus on it, go for it. Freddie takes off and the camera follows him for a bit. He is going very ...”

“... everywhere online. While the director (Sidney Lumet) and screenwriter (Joel Schumacher) were both white, the music was mostly written by the Black lyricist and composer Charlie Smalls, and produced by Quincy Jones. It tells a story of Black freedom and resistance through boogie-woogie, disco, funk and soul. The movie was an adaptation of a successful stage ...”

“... her consciousness’. In the Fold returns to the solipsistic territory of The Country Life. Michael, the narrator, is perplexed by what he calls ‘the business of human encounter’. Even a phone call home turns out to be ‘a pointless, self-referential act by which I had succeeded only in illuminating myself as an object’. And, as in The Country ...”

“... characters and speaks in their voices with the same confidence that he does in those of his white men and women. Davis Morel, an African-American holistic doctor, psychologist and militant anti-Christian polemicist newly arrived in Botswana, and Samuel Kerekang, a recently returned, Scots-educated Motswana agrarian reformer, are the most (at times the ...”

“... on socialism, Richard Crossman’s Bagehot, would hardly have come out of Whitehall, and Michael Manley would not have found time to write a history of West Indian cricket which encompasses the social, economic and regional problems of the Caribbean if he had been engaged in trying to resolve them in their present manifestations. There is no way of ...”

“... placed for shoulder. These lines and shapes precipitate a face, itself un-outlined, from out of white space, the unmistakable head of Harpo Marx. Turn a few more pages of Wendy Wick Reaves’s spectacular book Celebrity Caricature in America, the catalogue for an exhibition at the Smithsonian in Washington DC until 23 August, and you will also learn ...”