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“... I thought you were on your holyers!’ We sit and contemplate the high domed peak of Errigal, its white quartzy screes making it look snowy, beautiful, impossible. Two days later, Giti and I drive back to Errigal and climb it: a hard, steep climb over shaly paths, but it’s a warm, sunny day and we sit on the peak and look out over the country, cloud-shadows ...”

“... With Patrick Keiller’s work a suitable place to begin would seem to be the end – specifically The End (1986), the first film by him to incorporate the subject matter and use the techniques that came to typify his mature style. Seventeen minutes long, and photographed in the autumn of 1983 by Keiller and his sometime collaborator (and full-time partner), Julie Norris, The End consists of what might be termed mises-en-scène trouvées; if by this we are to understand the fortuitous discovery by the camera’s lens of landscapes, cityscapes and their largely spectral human inhabitants ...”

“... and grace, musically talented and gifted with a resonant bass voice, is induced by a dominant white culture to fill various roles – social, professional and indeed dramatic – formulated for blacks to perform. As long as he kept his place, he was rewarded with riches and fame, even public adoration. When he began to break out of his racial stereotype ...”

“... sale is entitled Princess with Orchid). He is said to have retained his prewar habit of wearing white kid gloves even while presiding over huge camouflage workshops. Dunoyer de Ségonzac, another member of the French camouflage section, was known for still lifes featuring eggs, bottles and cabbages, but not distorted guitars of Picasso’s Cubist kind. Some ...”

“... of the protean nature of Powell’s gifts of intellect as well as the odd shape of his career that Patrick Cosgrave decided to write of his subject’s ‘Lives’. This is a mistake, since Powell’s life has been very much of a piece. The failure, in the conventional sense, of his political career arose from the same personal traits and gifts as the ...”

“... paintings seem to have the virtues and vices of tastefulness. The colours: browns, greens, black, white and a pretty Gauloise blue are decorative, the shapes of bodies make hand-some patterns. But the effects seem too easy. It is as though, relieved that the freedom to distort form and invent patterns had been won by his masters, Vaughan hoped that the task ...”

“... various forms of sleaze are associated with the names of Cecil Parkinson, Nicholas Fairbairn and Patrick Nicholls. Leaving aside the proper ‘constitutional’ resignations of Lord Carrington, Leon Brittan and Michael Heseltine, and the not so proper ministerial non-resignations that cannot be mentioned for fear of the libel laws, we can still see that the ...”

“... Award, the most prominent prize for first novels in Australia; it was described by David Marr, Patrick White’s biographer, as ‘astonishingly talented’, and by Jill Kitson of the ABC as ‘a searingly truthful account of terrible wartime deeds that is also an imaginative work of extraordinary redemptive power’. Assuming, as we all did, that the ...”

“... be made of William Blake’s engravings for the Book of Job, and projected huge enlargements onto white sheets. Everyone was bored by the Oratorio, but found the engravings an impressive spectacle, except Misia Sert, the Parisian culture queen. She had never heard of Blake, and gave Edward some kindly advice: ‘If you want to help your little friend ...”

“... had no such vision. They would be blamed for ‘losing’ China. One of the great merits of Patrick Tyler’s history of this relationship is its down-to-earthness. He footnotes Li Peng’s diatribe thus: It is likely that Li Peng invoked the ‘losing China’ argument because he understood how powerful it was in domestic American politics. After so ...”

“... I register a notice in a window that says: ‘No coffee stored overnight.’ Once upon a time, white vans (for white men) were nervous about their tools and ladders, but now the value is in coffee, barista coffee, gold dust: the marching powder of the shared-desk classes who are hitting it hard in recovered container ...”

“... gypsum alabaster and calcite or onyx alabaster. Calcite alabaster from Egypt, commonly a creamy white with more translucent golden bands, is sometimes petalled, fleecy or cloudy in pattern, and darker types can occasionally resemble toffee. Its watery origin – often as stalactites – must have been well known and probably contributed to the old idea that ...”

“... the sort of charity-show swagger that mugs you with its understated discretion. Brilliant white collars, sharp enough to chop onions. Exuberant manacles of cuff. Silk ties forcibly repressed into knuckle sized knots. Ferociously bulled black shoes to mirror the action, dizzy from stomping on rib cages, hacking at kidneys, leaving hoofprints of polish ...”

“... a microchip factory. In Ruth Berghaus’s Frankfurt Götterdämmerung, described in some detail by Patrick Carnegy, the murdered Siegfried ‘was not solemnly borne aloft but brutally kicked aside by Hagen’s men’. Not all of these images are stupid or anti-musical, but as a whole they are symptoms of a process that has invaded opera over the past thirty or ...”

“... with any aspect of foreign policy … I can confirm that there have never been, whether in White House talks, in telegrams, in ambassadorial approaches, or even on the hot line, any attempts to link Vietnam with economic or monetary co-operation. In a cabinet meeting in February 1966 Wilson again denied the link, and Richard Crossman, the minister of ...”