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“... In Padua, on 20 January 1976, a young girl called Margherita Magello was repeatedly stabbed and left for dead. She was discovered by Massimo Carlotto, a 19-year-old student radical and member of Lotta Continua, who tried to save her, and, in doing so, got covered in her blood. She died, he was arrested and, a pawn in the struggle between Lotta Continua and the police, was tried for her murder ...”

“... of high fever, but I forced myself to stop crying, because I saw that it made William look very black. I had only myself to blame. I had agreed not to have children, although I had not realised it would mean taking this awful step. I felt quite sorry for myself, and longed to be comforted ... But I did not feel it wise to test further the great love that ...”

“... design’, weren’t much help with admired and already outsized figures like Bellow and Christopher Hitchens. Whatever the explanation, writing novels ‘about real men and women’, as Bellow habitually did, now strikes Amis as ‘an extraordinary thing to go and do’. His solution is a book that looks a lot like his memoir Experience. There’s ...”

“... the job in Dallas: he has been sent there by the Mafia-run Casino Operator’s Council to kill a black pimp who ‘shivved a twenty-one dealer’ back in Nevada. His unwanted hit fee is the titular ‘cold six thousand’. Also in town are the two surviving members of the Tabloid troika, Pete Bondurant and Ward Littell. Pete is a French-Canadian immigrant of ...”

“... the misty green mountains and the blue clouds of far away. And right over the picture there in big black letters EMERALD GEMS OF IRELAND. Emerald Gems of Ireland is a songbook and this isn’t its first appearance in The Butcher Boy. It’s first seen inside the music case of Philip Nugent, a boy whose family becomes the focus of all Francie’s obsessions ...”

“... Where’s a burn? – she’s first on the other side. She flowed through fences like a piece of black wind. The abruptness of these jottings seems to relate the poem to an ancient style of praise-singing that one is glad to see revived here, and the inconsistency of the tenses is a positive bonus. The hyperbolic flourish of ‘like a piece of ...”

“... Alexander reminded me that Black once said that he was prepared to let his editors have a completely free hand except on one subject. He forbade attacks on American Presidents in general and President Reagan in particular. Entry for 18 April 1986, Not Many Dead The success of Michael Moore’s film about Roger Smith and General Motors has aroused an envious spirit of emulation in my breast ...”

“... with Julian Baggini’, ‘Urban Gardening’, ‘How To Be Cool’. There were also some stuffed black birds, and eight birch trunks fixed upright between the floor and ceiling – four in a window bay and four further back near a leopardskin-print chaise-longue. The assistant said that she thought the trees were from a forest in Kent; she didn’t know ...”

“... a near-infinity of characters, events and incidental detail. Less ambitious, but more subversive, Christopher Stevenson and Hugh Nissenson seek to dismantle the system from within by producing novels which look like something else altogether: a form of experimentation which often has rather puritanical motives behind it – the assumption being either that ...”

“... Wolfe himself when he attended Leonard Bernstein’s never-to-be-forgotten cocktail party for the Black Panthers. ‘Radical Chic’ has passed so far into the Anglo-American argot that it may be futile, 13 years later, to attempt to expose it. For one thing, it was so nearly right. Everybody knew somebody who answered or fitted the description. For ...”

“... The American artist Christopher Wool’s large abstract paintings are often beautiful, but they are so emptied of content that it is at first hard to know what to make of them. For the first ten years or so after he came to attention in the mid-1980s, he was considered an artist’s artist: he didn’t have a large public following or much of an international reputation ...”

“... Algerian uprisings and attempted suppressions, he picked up a copy of Paris-Match; on the cover a black soldier, in uniform, was looking up, presumably at the French flag, and giving the salute. A simple image conveying, on the surface, a simple statement: here is a black soldier saluting the flag. But beyond the simple ...”

“... or in these from the Pisan Cantos: Lithe turning of water,        sinews of Poseidon, Black azure and hyaline,        glass wave over Tyro ...”

“... For Christopher Logue The talk-radio host is trying to shake the wacko with only a minute left to get in the finance and boner-pill spots before signing off, the morning news team already at the door and dairy vans streaming from the gates of WholesomeBest, fanning out across the vast plateau. Fair skies, high cumulus cloud – the birds are in full throat as dawn ignites in the east, rinsing the heavens with a coral pink ...”

“... devil’s advocate with some other ci-devant industries: ‘The watchmaking companies in the Black Forest went over to quartz, lots of capital investment, but they lost out at the lower end to the Pacific Rim, and at the quality end to Swatch. And they’ve nearly all gone, or been taken over. But the cuckoo clock people didn’t change at all. They’ve ...”