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“... her past: a notebook and a business card for a Russian restaurant in Smithfield: Semyon’s place. Naomi Watts is Anna, the midwife who wants to find the child’s family. Anna can’t read Russian and so needs to have the notebook translated. Her heavy-drinking Russian uncle, played by the Polish film director Jerzy Skolimowski, refuses to touch it until too ...”

“... David Mitchell​ is a career-long genre-bender. Only with his fourth book, Black Swan Green (2006), did he raid his own store of experience to write a first-novelish novel, a charming if low-key coming-of-age story, set in Worcestershire in 1982, full of references to Findus Crispy Pancakes, the Falklands War and playground slang ...”

“... the New York Times, smokes and eats their food. A week later, on a hot day, he visits his friend Naomi Kane in an old tenement on MacDougal Street, which is thronged with ‘slow, turgid crowds of sightseers’ soaking up the new ‘apocalyptic atmosphere’ of Greenwich Village. In a squalid apartment, he meets Naomi’s ...”

“... played by MacLachlan, to take his place in the otherworld on the real Cooper’s release. So the black-eyed, mahogany-tanned Evil Cooper got to carry on with his sinister activities, while the genuine item, near-catatonic, shuffled into Dougie’s place, where he stayed for the next 13 episodes. Meanwhile an FBI taskforce, headed by Cole, looked into some ...”

“... a passe-partout, and the beginnings of Kaddish, Ginsberg’s extraordinary poem to his mother, Naomi. Michaud doesn’t try to present Paris as the Beat city par excellence, but Ginsberg wrote several good poems besides the first part of Kaddish while he was lounging ‘on a bed in Paris/sunglow through the high/window on plaster walls … alone in old red ...”

“... Vanity Fair in full make-up and a bulging décolletage, her arms around the bare biceps of the two black bodyguards she calls ‘my centurions’. In the introduction to Sex, Art and American Culture, a bizarre grab-bag of book reviews, interviews, transcribed lectures, classroom notes and personal memorabilia, Paglia gleefully provides an annotated ...”

“... attention to the barbarism and inequality of New York’s jails (which in 2020 were 58 per cent Black, compared to 20 per cent in the city as a whole), and the US legal system more generally. After several years of intense scrutiny by local and national media and vigorous campaigning by a coalition of community and advocacy groups, New York City Council ...”

“... him a wind-up gramophone).In 1966, more than 40 per cent of the singles sold in Britain were by Black artists, many of them on Motown Records. Local doo-wop groups were recruited from street corners and sock-hops and given in-house lessons in deportment; it was crucial to present an image of Blackness that could attract a mainstream audience. The ...”

“... with ram’s horns on their head, was probably there for the football; a skinhead dressed in black with several earrings was probably an assistant professor; but at the convention centre security guards checked badges to make sure no civilians slipped into sessions on ‘Mayan Textual Practices’ or ‘Pierre Loti Today’. The MLA offers something for ...”

“... of Independence had called ‘merciless Indian Savages’. ‘When this is all over,’ Cofer Black, Bush’s chief counterterrorist adviser, assured his boss, ‘the bad guys are going to have flies walking across their eyeballs.’ The mood was infectious among the personnel in charge of exterminating the brutes. The Atlantic’s Robert Kaplan ...”

“... virgin territory. The space had once been a community art venture called King Ubu, operated by the Black Mountain poet Robert Duncan and his collagist partner Jess Collins. Duncan, removing his clothes at the conclusion of his verse play Faust Foutu, in order to demonstrate the meaning of nakedness, anticipated by a decade or so the Ginsberg party trick that ...”

“... called them. Mailer’s ‘The White Negro’, for instance, has a Faustian hipster jealous of the black man’s intenser and more frequent orgasms and scornful of the puritan virtues of self-containment: ‘A stench of fear has come out of every pore of American life, and we suffer from a a collective failure of nerve.’ Ginsberg and Kerouac, too, tended to ...”

“... penalty last year after drowning her two small sons and claiming they’d been kidnapped by a black man; New York’s Awilda Lopez, whose alleged torture and murder of her six-year-old daughter Elisa Izquierdo became a holiday-season media spectacular. The current fixation on maternity has a long history. ‘We are a nation obsessed with ...”

“... phone booths used as urinals, the entire city as a running sore – finds its locus in a soigné black pickpocket in a camel-hair coat who, as the pièce de résistance after isolating and robbing Sammler, forces the old man to look down as he exposes himself. Quite a production is made of the Unbuttoning, and the organ itself is prosed with an exotic plump ...”

“... his family – but as ‘the saga of us as a people’: a template for the stories of all Black Americans, one which seemed to demonstrate that despite the systematic destruction of formal family ties by chattel slavery, children of the African diaspora could still recover family histories stretching back to the continent of their ancestors. Drawing ...”