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“... from a boy of 15 the flirtatiousness would be much more shocking. All productions put him in black leather and a little cap such as Orton himself used to wear. Here too an outfit that is not so self-conscious would serve the play better. The more ordinary it is the more shocking it will seem. 3 February. One of the cards of condolence we get on Anne’s ...”

“... ex-friend Steve Bannon snuggles up in the address book next to Debonnaire von Bismarck. Conrad Black (with more than a dozen numbers) is next to Tony Blair (home number only) and the former mayor of New York Michael Bloomberg (who also lived on Tom Wolfe’s street). There are lots of British socialites (brought to him ...”

“... police officers were acquitted of using excessive force in the act of arresting Rodney King, a black man, Unsworth won half the Booker Prize – the other half went to Michael Ondaatje for The English Patient – for a novel that in its unsparing portrayal of life aboard an 18th-century slave ship looked back to the ...”

“... folk, on foot, weighed down by terrible burdens; then the clergy, bishops as well as monks, all black-cowled and weeping; another black-robed, fiery army of knights then rode by, on black chargers. All these numbers of the dead were suffering horrible tortures, the women especially, for ...”

“... style of interesting poets like Peter Didsbury, John Ash, Pauline Stainer and one of the editors, Michael Hulse, is not particularly ‘democratic’, but playfully enigmatic and donnish. There is a tendency to think aloud with a somewhat creaky jauntiness, as if the poets were sharing secrets with their desks; It has been raining all day, and I found myself ...”

“... The title​ of Cedric Robinson’s Black Marxism is misleading. Shelving it under ‘Marxism’ never seems right for a book that questions the compatibility of Black radicalism and Marxist politics, as well as considering aspects of history, sociology and political theory. Robinson’s reluctance to be classified hasn’t always worked in his favour ...”

“... When​ Black Lives Matter demonstrations erupted across the United States and then the world last year, their target was not Derek Chauvin, the Minneapolis police officer who murdered George Floyd. Floyd’s murder resonated so widely because Chauvin’s brutality signified something deeper and more pervasive. The video footage of Floyd’s death offered evidence of both an ideology (white supremacy) and the system that sustains it (racism) at their most fundamental level: state murder ...”

“... rest of his audience, but the real joke is that they in turn find his account of a city covered in black fog, with a huge palace of glass, a pointless and irritating fabrication. The South American Spanish are perhaps more comic in The Purple Land than they ever were to be again in Hudson’s writing. They christen their children not only Conception, Ascension ...”

“... very convincing alternatives, and he is prone to mention only ludicrous ones such as the use of black magic or our all being controlled by demons: if such absurdities were the only conceivable alternatives to his theory, there would surely be little substance to the claim that it is an empirical hypothesis. Chomsky comes closest to giving a substantial ...”

“... We get the following points of view mingled with many others: that of Cotter Martin, a 14-year old black boy, who has jumped the turnstiles to get in for free; that of Russ Hodges, a radio commentator; those of J. Edgar Hoover, Frank Sinatra and Jackie Gleason who have arrived together. Gleason is playing hookey from a rehearsal for The Honeymooners , has been ...”

“... word in the song, and about the words that are missing from it: The song never says that she’s black, and it’s his best Civil Rights song because it never says she’s black. Everybody knows she’s black and it has nothing to do with knowing the newspaper story. You just know that ...”

“... the obvious oddity that Britain’s most famous racist should be worshipped on an island of black people. We ought to respect Tannese belief, Baylis says, but at the same time we have the right to enjoy the irony of it all. The Duke of Edinburgh is on the book’s electric orange cover, with the sun for a halo, palm trees sprouting from his ...”

“... Pembroke. The Rival Poet of Sonnet 86 remains George Chapman, not, as some think, Samuel Daniel or Michael Drayton or Christopher Marlowe or Ben Jonson or, since his was assuredly an ‘alien pen’ (Sonnet 78), Torquato Tasso. Candidates for the doubtful honour of being the Dark Lady are discussed (so far as the list went in 1970) and a slight preference is ...”

“... of highlights, grasping the fact, for example, that the end of a nose or a cheek, even a brown or black nose or cheek, will often be the brightest part of the face – brighter than the ‘white’ of the eye, which is, in fact, usually grey and shadowed by the eye socket – is one step on the path leading from naive to ‘realistic’ representations of ...”

“... question arrests us on the first page of The English Patient:   Every four days she washes his black body, beginning at the destroyed feet ...   She has nursed him for months and she knows the body well, the penis sleeping like a sea horse, the thin tight hips. Hipbones of Christ, she thinks. He is her despairing saint. He lies flat on his back, no ...”