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“... Last year, Louis Knickerbocker, a meat distributor from Newport Beach, California, bought a Picasso drawing from the online service of Costco for $40,000. Knickerbocker thought it a steal: ‘They just sell the top quality,’ he told the New York Times, ‘whatever you buy at Costco, whether it’s a washing-machine or a vacuum cleaner ...”

“... master.’ Ten years later he said his father might have been a mulatto. In other words, as Henry Louis Gates put it, Douglass ‘completely diminished the whiteness and the masterness of his father over ten years’. In his 1854 essay ‘The Claims of the Negro, Ethnologically Considered’, Douglass stated baldly that ‘intellect is uniformly derived from ...”

“... regretting his lost youth. Don Draper also has a Stifled Wife, Betty, who is styled like Grace Kelly, and exhibits the twitchy anxiety of suburban housewives as described by Betty Friedan in The Feminine Mystique before their liberation came via feminism; she is a child, and her mother has just died, leaving her at sea in a world of uncaring men. There are ...”

“... Hollywood reactionary philistinism, a quantity of which its incarnation, the Russian-born MGM boss Louis B. Mayer, gives us a mouthful twenty years later, reported in Lilian Ross’s Picture. Mayer’s colourful words come from a more embattled epoch; at the time of McCarthy it’s inconceivable that any Soviet director should have been given a Hollywood ...”

“... of the engraving identifies the volume as Voyage autour du monde, a historical atlas and record of Louis de Freycinet’s second expedition to the South Seas in 1817. According to the catalogue of the National Library of Australia, ‘Sauvages des environs de la rivière Nepean’ is Plate 100 in the folio and it is the work of two artists – Alphonse Pellion ...”

“... Grant’ was a familiar ambition even before he was the embodiment of that ambition. The actor Louis Jourdan remembered him in his early films: ‘He is a man of the street pretending to be Cary Grant!’ This is what McCann shows so well. Cary Grant the actor, with his raised eyebrow and twitches, combined with Cary Grant the superimposed identity ...”

“... Richard Hamilton says that ‘Robert’s was the best gallery I knew in London,’ Ellsworth Kelly that ‘he was a very courageous and flamboyant dealer,’ Claes Oldenburg that ‘Robert really had an eye for draughtsmanship. Very few dealers have.’ He also had a great flair for presentation. To begin with, when he first opened a gallery, he chose ...”

“... what makes ‘On Being Brought from Africa to America’, in Walker’s terms, ‘sickly’. Henry Louis Gates Jr called it ‘the most reviled poem in African American literature’. It contributed to the view of readers in the 1960s and 1970s who, informed by Black nationalism and the Black Arts Movement, found nothing in Wheatley’s poetry but ...”

“... else just wanted the voice. After the Bon Soir there were gigs in nightclubs in Detroit, St Louis and New York, as well as her first television appearance. She dropped the middle ‘a’ from ‘Barbara’.The praise was endless. Marty Erlichman, who would become her agent, saw her perform at the Bon Soir and came to see her backstage. ‘I have the ...”