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“... publishers in the world: Philip Graham, who inherited the Washington Post from his father-in-law, Eugene Meyer, and his shy, self-effacing wife, Katharine, who took over the company when her husband shot himself in 1963. It was Philip Graham who induced John Kennedy to choose Lyndon Johnson as his running-mate in 1960. This was wise and far-reaching ...”

“... is not so much a character as a type, and is not unlike the Shelleyan poet in Shaw’s Candida, Eugene Marchbanks. Aerial creatures, these, ineffectual angels. Eugene, ‘so uncommon as to be almost unearthly’, wants to go ‘up into the sky’. His brow is ‘lined with pity’. He speaks with ‘lyric rapture’. But ...”

“... that the people listening are so close he can almost touch them: they are the art-house crowd in black turtlenecks and trenchcoats, and they have a certain sophistication. The least unknown of Basara’s novels is Fama o biciklistima (1988) – speculatively, ‘The Fuss about Cyclists’ – and I looked up a copy to find out what the fuss was about. It ...”

“... After two weeks in Canada, the Phi Beta Kappa tour kicked off at the University of Oregon in Eugene, a little oasis of the Sixties where the newspaper was advertising Oregon Wineries, a concert of Balinese gamelan and a rich menu of counselling: depression and grief resolution, sexual abuse and incest, ACOA and codependency, inner-child, emotional-body ...”

“... much finished, thanks to Max, a young Latvian who’s unsmiling but an excellent carpenter and Eugene, much jollier and from New Zealand who has supervised it all. Walking round the job this evening R. is shocked to discover in the bathroom above the bath a crudely made wooden cross. He takes this to be the work of Max who, scarcely out of his ...”

“... Chicago. Much of Maldoror’s approach over her long career is set out in Monangambeee. ‘I am black,’ she told Marguerite Duras in 1958, ‘I need to think of myself as black.’ She was also a committed anti-colonialist: monangambeee is an elongation of the Kimbundu word for ‘contract labourer’; it was one of the ...”

“... 130 rounds were fired. Ten men were killed, including Walter Chapman and his brother; one, Alan Black, survived despite having being shot 18 times. The Kingsmill massacre took place the day after five Catholic men were shot dead by a loyalist gang that included at least one RUC officer. At about 6 p.m. three masked men went into a house in Whitecross (near ...”

“... is another fifty-year-old Brit’, only to be informed by the department secretary: ‘He’s a black cowboy!’ (Everett had worked as a rancher and mule trainer.) In his essay ‘Hidden Name and Complex Fate’, Ralph Ellison, who reduced his middle name (Waldo) to a ‘simple and mysterious “W.”’, argued that African Americans – ‘especially if ...”

“... famous slogan ‘The Eye that Never Sleeps’, had a favourite novel, which he frequently reread: Eugene Aram, he constantly averred, was die greatest novel in history. This romantic tale of human frailty, murder, remorse and incrimination satisfied the great detective’s imaginative needs and moral sense. Pinkerton himself wrote, or gave the protection of ...”

“... him is a bust of George Sand, regal in white alabaster, and at her feet another, of Balzac, almost black but with his frown clearly visible. A dejected-looking Baudelaire hangs back in the shadows. A spidery-legged Nadar – he had especially long, skinny legs – sits casually in the middle. The pantheon was first published in 1854; a revised version came out ...”

“... Armadillo is similar, a story that spools out between two names: our hero calls himself Lorimer Black and ends up as Milomre Blocj. Like the author of NatTate, Black is a dissimulator, but one whose project has nothing jokey about it: after an embarrassing episode at university he changes his name and decides to live as ...”

“... family). Woodward understood early that the Jim Crow system, built on the disenfranchisement of Black voters, lynching, racial segregation and a biased criminal justice system, made a travesty of the country’s supposed commitment to equality and opportunity. Where did his rebellious outlook originate? Cobb credits the influence of his uncle and ...”

“... men are victims of romantic grandiosity; a deliberate literariness infests the book, as it does Eugene Onegin. Characters take their cues from romantic fashions, and from writers like Scott, Pushkin, Byron, Rousseau and Marlinsky (a producer of Caucasian adventures and the most popular Russian novelist of the 1830s). This is how Pechorin is first ...”

“... Signs of disintegration are everywhere in Iraq. Oily columns of black smoke billow up from the airport road where US patrols are regularly hit by suicide bombers or roadside bombs between Baghdad and Camp Victory, the gigantic US headquarters on the edge of the airport. In a vain attempt to deny cover to resistance fighters, American soldiers have chopped down the palm trees and bushes beside the highway, leaving only the stumps behind ...”

“... negative was fixed allowed a precision which, at this point, paper couldn’t match. Yet printing black on silver makes for an image that isn’t only expensive, but also difficult to see – one of many reasons why by the mid-1860s, silver-based negatives (as well as paper ones) had mostly yielded to glass. The brief triumph of the paper negative is a key ...”