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“... is a singularly fitting profession, requiring cogitation first and foremost. On the other hand, as Michael White and John Gribbin intimate, Hawking seems to have been a listless student and a rather charmless young man before ALS struck, obviously intelligent but lacking any passion to use his intelligence in one direction rather than another. Thus arises the ...”

“... at the scale of structural and environmental racism exposed by the pandemic. This wasn’t news to black, indigenous and Hispanic Americans, who are subject to mass incarceration, have significantly lower incomes and higher unemployment rates than the white population, and for whom the healthcare system and the overwhelmingly segregated education system and ...”

“... animated by a single brain, they prepare the spell together. She glues on her G-string and the black lace bows (one carefully crooked) that cover her breasts. Between numbers, he officiates as dresser, the spotlights set so that only his arms are seen: she wants the audience to assume her dresser is a maid. The act is provocative yet chaste: the audience ...”

“... nearly every mention of knife crime in the rest of the national press was in connection with young Black people in London.According to Home Office data, almost half of all homicides in England and Wales are ‘drug-related’, but this is a very broad definition: recent analysis by Vice News found that it includes incidents in which those involved had been ...”

“... Lawrence’s 1941 Migration series have at last been assembled in their entirety. As a 23-year-old black painter in Harlem, Lawrence chronicled the experiences of black Southerners who fled the Jim Crow South for the cities of the North. The North was far from the promised land: the slums where blacks settled were ...”

“... on the complex miracle the devil has performed. A similar sort of miracle occurs in Bulgakov’s Black Snow, the (unfinished) novel he wrote about his experiences with the Moscow Art Theatre, a place he called ‘the graveyard of my plays’. A new work, initially accepted by the theatre, disappears into the crossfire of backstage politics and vanities, and ...”

“... The continuing American blindness to Vietnam itself, in this and many other instances, notably Michael Cimino’s film The Deer Hunter (1978), can be astonishing, but the myth also shows some genuine self-understanding. Apocalypse Now, in particular, is full of the sense that Americans exported whole chunks of their culture to Vietnam and discovered its ...”

“... in a small suitcase. He was neat but often wore the same clothes – a leather jacket or black and white tweed overcoat and dark corduroy trousers. His money he carried in cash, usually great wads of it. If he was robbed he didn’t much complain about it. The image changed very little after this. White quotes an American observer at the Democratic ...”

“... model of Fuller’s 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 ...”

“... her son the appropriate medical help because ‘they did not want to get their hands dirty with a black man’s blood.’ The day after the murder, the Lawrences, acting on advice from the Anti-Racist Alliance, took the unusual step of appointing a lawyer, Imran Khan, as their representative – an act of some legal sophistication. Imran Khan was to have a ...”

“... a layer of enigmatic stardust over films I wouldn’t otherwise have been interested in, such as Michael Winner’s Lawman or the Danny La Rue vehicle Our Miss Fred – or, indeed, David Essex’s Stardust. These films were out of reach, but only just out of reach. Forbidden fruit hanging almost low enough to be plucked.I knew that I wanted to read Offbeat ...”

“... Times to his empire in 1966, and was similarly rewarded with a seat in the House of Lords. Conrad Black came on the scene in the spring of 1985, paid £10 million for a minority stake in the Telegraph Group, and later the same year became its controlling shareholder for the modest expenditure of another £20 million. He, too, has acquired a peerage, to the ...”

“... and a zinc coffin, and do something to the remains involving chicken heads, inverted crosses and black candles, I don’t doubt that he would. In an epigraph over his preface – the first words in the book, effectively – he quotes an oblique little exchange from Waiting for Godot: Estragon: All the dead voices. Vladimir: To be dead is not enough for ...”

“... as in my own constituency of Birkenhead – have been hit by unemployment as if by some kind of Black Death. Since the advent of this Tory government in 1979, 65,000 of the city’s jobs, one in five, have vanished. In manufacturing alone the total loss of jobs has been 40,000, with the result that Liverpool’s manufacturing industry has been almost halved ...”

“... Virginia Woolf said, but she wasn’t thinking of brain surgery. Memories of Amnesia is a black joke about inner landscapes, or more precisely, about a mind turned inside out. Subjectivity, that spreading territory of so much modern writing, becomes a sort of intellectual circus, an arena where hectic and unanswerable arguments cross like missiles in ...”