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“... faces south of the river for regular bits of business, cash drops. These heavy suits would sit, white-knuckled, fingers digging into the scarlet leather, until they made it safely home to Poplar. They piled into the nearest boozer and pitched back the doubles until they could lift a shot glass without spilling half of its contents. The ride to the tunnel ...”

“... and abroad.From the beginning, Kollwitz used the dramatic contrasts afforded by black ink and white paper to illustrate the plight of the poor. Need (Not), for example, a lithograph she worked on from 1893-97, depicts a weaver’s cottage lit by a single window – which is to say, hardly at all. Only the essential details stand out: a man and child, a ...”

“... chair’. Clark noted that Beardsley’s work showed Munch ‘how simplified areas of black and white can work on the emotions’ and that Picasso, who had seen Beardsley’s prints in the Barcelona art journal Joventut, ‘made good use of Beardsley’s pure outlines’. I half-expected him to go on and make the obvious connection with Guernica, the great ...”

“... at your door, papier-mâché heads, a cloud no bigger than ... It might have been blue satin, Peter Stuyvesant Gold, Deep Heat, umbrella pines, familiar two-note calls repeated at intervals, a lifeguard’s upraised hand. It didn’t matter what it was, almost anything would do to bring it all back to you, then take it away again. Till Soon How I laughed ...”

“... for a surrogate mother in every relationship,’ says Elizabeth Sweeting). His ‘marriage’ to Peter Pears, begun shortly after Mrs Britten’s death, may be partly understood in this light (Pears’s singing voice, it was noted, was uncannily similar to Mrs Britten’s), as may his lifelong willingness to be looked after, sometimes dominated, by a series ...”

“... poems, which contain lines like these, in ‘Star Damage at Home’, from the 1969 collection The White Stones:                               ... That some star not included in the middle heavens should pine in earth, not shine above the skys and those cloudy vapours? That it really should burn with fierce heat, explode its ...”

“... had travelled more than 20 kilometres to arrive at our table.’ To accompany them, ‘pink-and-white peaches with the complexion of a Boucher milkmaid’ and ‘figs so ripe their purple skins had started to split open, threatening to reveal their juicy, red, pornographic interiors’. The House in France is Wells’s account of life with her mother, the ...”

“... Tim Lott’s first novel, White City Blue, came out in 1999. The narrator, Frankie Blue, is a West London estate agent. His best friends are Tony, Nodge and Colin. Diamond Tony – formally, Anthony Diamonte – is a flash Italian hairdresser: handsome, charming, apparently successful, he has a flair for cruelty. Nodge – or Noj, Jon backwards – is an overweight cab driver with intellectual pretensions ...”

“... pimp roll’. Sherman feels as generations of blacks must have done when confronted with the white-sheeted lynch mob: ‘the one nearest him had on a silvery basket-ball warm-up jacket with CELTICS written across the chest ... He was no more than four or five steps away ... powerfully built ... His jacket was open ... a ...”

“... appearing as a peevish young icon slouched on a chair with a moody, come-hither expression, a pure white cat on his lap and his bare feet submerged in the pile of a white rug in Mr and Mrs Clark and Percy, the portrait by David Hockney that aspired to Gainsborough as a take on the aristocracy of London, c.1971, but owed more ...”

“... kind of freedom. Mrs Wrayburn, like Fred’s sisters and mother, who stitch banners in the purple white and green of the WSPU, will gain less from the changes to come than Daisy, who has nothing to lose and is already quite tough. When Kelly, the journalist who has cost her her job, meets her as she sets out for Cambridge, she lets him propostion her. ‘He ...”

“... up with an emotionally and anatomically limited set of human characters: especially his handsome white-skinned goddesses, whose bodies, despite his brilliant way with pale flesh, are oddly stiff and un-fleshly. When they are naked their straight backs and high, small breasts mimic the shape they would have had beneath constricting bodices of the kind worn by ...”

“... became a schoolmaster in Kent, and his son became a headmaster in Essex, and his son, my father, Peter Bunting, fought with distinction, while only a very young man, in the Second World War, and after it was over went up to Brasenose College, Oxford – the first time a Bunting had been so elevated, and unfortunately the last, since I was a student only at ...”

“... films, for example. It is a rather strange part of the world, inhabited for the most part by white men in jodhpurs and pith helmets, with revolvers strapped around their waists, who are followed about by hordes of half naked porters carrying bundles on their heads. These bundles seem to be used for one purpose only: they are to be thrown down on the ...”

“... never mind that the cigarette was unlit – has been overlaid by a minimalist design of red and white text stamped on a wash of black, intimating No Logo chic. In the introductory chapter, in one of those famous footnotes, Amis remarks that ‘actually there’s a good reason, a structural reason, why novelists should excite corrosiveness in the ...”