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“... numbers are independent entities rather than useful abstractions, ‘islands floating in a great black sea of nothingness’ into which he’s afraid of falling.The practical outcome of this – that David can’t or won’t do sums – doesn’t please his teachers. At the same time, adults who spend any time with him tend to become convinced that he’s ...”

“... what’s done to them by way of chopping, biting, thwacking and impaling) all symbols of black male genitalia? Was the white race produced by women lepers who fled to the Caucasus and coupled with jackals? Do surnames like Dunn, Grey and Douglas, and place-names like Dublin and Blackpool, indicate concealed African origins? Were the Mende people of ...”

“... by Keira Knightley. The movie – David Cronenberg’s A Dangerous Method, with a screenplay by Christopher Hampton – opens with a view of her struggling against her captors in a horse-drawn coach (the date is 1904) and being delivered to a posh sanatorium in Switzerland. She goes rigid when she tries to talk, can’t at first get her words out, but ...”

“... a state of willed obliviousness to the collapse of British power, having mixed feelings about the Black and Tans and spouting platitudes about the common people being too warmhearted to embrace the ‘appalling Shinners’, until the big fire comes along. There are plot developments: Ripon elopes with a rich Catholic miller’s daughter, disgracing himself in ...”

“... opted for a bikini wax.) Apart from the matelot’s scarf round his neck, the rest was his lithe, black, naked bod. (For comparison, on this stretch of the tour Jagger mostly wore jerseys representing local American football teams.) Prince’s biracial, polysexual band likewise came off as a distinctly queer sight in this locale. They were everything that ...”

“... in London slums – ‘sinister courts where the police hesitated to penetrate, but where your black bag protected you from harm’ – to write Liza of Lambeth (1897), ‘a very clever realistic study of factory girl and coster life’, as his publisher’s reader put it. Further novels and a Spanish travel book followed, but they didn’t make much money ...”

“... fascinating literature about the act and art of translation, often described metaphorically, as by Christopher Middleton: ‘The translator has to imagine his way on the tentacles of language through to the bedrock sea bottom of the imagination of his author.’ Some translators, like Middleton, are poets, most are not, but the capabilities needed to render a ...”

“... Sacco and Vanzetti darker horses than we thought. The Rosenbergs at least half-guilty. Most of the Black Panthers (always excepting those murdered by the FBI) amazingly guilty. The McNamara brothers certainly guilty. The Haymarket martyrs probably innocent, and the later Chicago conspiracy defendants also, even if they tried their best to be guilty. Mitigation ...”

“... centre of the clearing, their faces, breasts and thighs barred with broad thickly-laid stripes of black and red. Feathers of brilliant birds decked their hair. Ornaments of bone and hide hung at their ankles and wrists. The idiot watched this with obsessive interest. He had even tried to enter the hut in which the women were being decorated. It took the old ...”

“... the word derives from ‘the ancient Greek custom of driving out a sheep, or tragos (usually a black one), in a bid to expiate a city’s crimes’. Full marks again. Sitting around in his office considering the ‘plain and big-boned’ Ulrike Meinhof (‘my network of highly educated, highly trained subversives … would be the ...”

“... assertion that the two positive Griess tests were proof of recent contact with explosives. Dr Hugh Black, a former Home Office chief inspector of explosives, appearing as a witness for the defence, pointed out that a range of innocent substances – anything containing nitrocellulose – could produce a positive Griess test. The problem was that ...”

“... to problems of figure and ground: how to combine the domestic scale with the broad view. Even Christopher Burns’s The Flint Bed, which looks to be going to find its subject in English provincial life, expands (via a plot tied to a photograph from 1975 of desperate refugees fighting to get onto a helicopter lifting off from the American Embassy in ...”

“... presents several rows of knickers for every royal occasion: Union Jack knickers for state visits, black knickers for state funerals, tartan for Balmoral, knickers printed all over with corgis for home, and appliquéd with real holly for Christmas, ‘which is why she keeps her Christmas message very short’. She gets into a terrible flap trying to decide ...”

“... white explorers said to have been hailed as gods – Francis Drake, Hernán Cortés, Captain Cook, Christopher Columbus, to name a few – acquired a new star in the mid-1970s, when Prince Philip vacationed off the coast of Tanna, in what was then the New Hebrides, aboard HMY Britannia. Ever since, a string of Englishmen have made the pilgrimage to the ...”

“... transported to one of those Fifties films in which middle-aged young men in macs and hats and black spectacles are forever jumping into Daimlers and roaring down to Wallingford. The target of the British bomb, as has long been known, was not the Soviet Union but the United States. Its purpose was to restore the political co-operation that had been all but ...”