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“... than her own, and its even more terrible consequences.’ Clearly, a dreadful experience. But Michael Shelden, George Orwell’s biographer and in Spurling’s view one of those responsible for disparaging Sonia, has a slightly different take on the event. Interviewing her sister and half-brother, he claims that fearing for her life in the struggle with ...”

“... with its proprietor’s economic interests and opinions, and the Telegraph, owned then by Conrad Black, a Canadian by birth, reflected Black’s far right American views. Both Murdoch and Black were and are extreme Europhobes. Major resigned on the morning of his defeat in 1997. His ...”

“... II – on the balcony of one, Hyman Roth slices up a birthday cake with a frosting map of Cuba as Michael Corleone and other Mob chieftains look on – or from the classic Soviet-era agitprop film I Am Cuba, in which rich Americans frolic around rooftop swimming-pools. Meantime, a few storeys below, a revolution looms. These relics are the hotels the Mob ...”

“... as quickly as I managed to get a foot inside the door, I was sent a copy of Byzantium endures – Michael Moorcock. That one, icons iconing, balalaikas balalaikaing, kept me up nights marking pages, memorising passages, and dreaming dreams of a vividness and thrust that I hadn’t experienced since I was in the Army. My well-intentioned friends in Poland ...”

“... What​ was it like growing up in black and white?’ was a question I asked my mother once. Until that moment her memories of childhood, so much more engrossing than any bedtime story, had unspooled in my head in perfect greyscale. (They do still, in childish defiance of the facts.) It wasn’t as if I’d seen many photographs of her as a girl – I still haven’t – but simply that the past, as I had perceived it, was defined by an absence of colour ...”

“... passing, like a pleasant sitting-room with chintzy chairs, into another room at the back. It has a black-and-white checked floor and is full of easels. At each easel there is an old woman, wearing a smock. Some have paintbrushes in their hands and are managing to dip them occasionally into paint and splodge on the paper in front of them. Such a passage would ...”

“... went on to describe the park at the top of the cliffs, full of prowling servicemen in the wartime black-out, a sex jungle at night. He felt nervous, but Tennessee was in his element. Neither of the two most memorable characters in this book was ‘anybody’: Frank Merlo, the playwright’s lover and adviser, who died of cancer and/or a broken heart, his long ...”

“... of Buenos Aires, make this book as absorbing as any thriller. Where Costantini stops short at the black hole into which the desaparecidos vanished, Omar Rivabella takes us inside, and incidentally reminds us that the moral choice which Francisco Sanctis enjoyed was something of a luxury. The reader of Requiem for a Woman’s Soul has to piece together the ...”

“... they sup on unsuspecting humans when they can, but otherwise it’s work and pleasure as usual: black clothes, pale faces, no brains. There are glimpses of a later London, where the escalators in the Underground never work and trains are late ‘due to delays’; a whole litter of movie references; and good gags about journalism and art colleges. But what ...”

“... here, to tell the truth,’ Sancho says, presumably telling the truth. ‘For one thing I’m black and white in a full-colour universe.’ And for the moment, he doesn’t seem visible to anyone except his father. Will he die if his father stops thinking about him? ‘If you get imagined into being, does that mean that after that you can just be?’ If ...”

“... spent their brief, uneasy childhoods in clay nests alongside siblings, small, mad planets, black as forest berries. This looping through sensation, through layerings of metaphor and whimsy, this tracing of delicate aerial patternings, this speeding instability is what you get in Zagajewski. Contraries – hard and soft, timidity and boldness, silence ...”

“... these people and these events seem to compose a hysterical opera composed in about equal parts black comedy and magic realism, as if Angela Carter, perhaps, had rewritten The Good Soldier Svejk, a work Meek mentions in his notes; and in the book the Jewish lieutenant, Mutz, has a similar thought. It did not seem possible that a woman whose husband had ...”

“... a page or so. What happened in those two years? In the first, Véra was in a sanatorium in the Black Forest for seven weeks. She was with her mother, and Schiff simply says Véra’s ‘health was also fragile at the time’. Voronina and Boyd offer Véra’s own ‘depression, anxiety, weight loss’ as the reason for her spell away from home. These are ...”

“... over the fire. It’s the size of a marshmallow. It bubbles and blackens to Campfire goo – Burnt-black skin outside Gooey Jew. From the 20th century’s 24/7 chimneys, choo-choo- Train puffs of white smoke rise. The trains waddle full of cattle to the camps. The weightless puffs of smoke are on their way to the sky. Ovens cremate fields of human cow. Ovens ...”

“... all, of Reger’s sentences’ – in a sort of lopsided barbershop trio. One that sings only the black notes. A normal novel is at pains to differentiate between its characters by making them talk, about themselves and about each other, in distinct, individuated ways. He do the police in different voices and so on. In Bernhard, though, there is a convergence ...”