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“... Even when he was elected to the Senate at the age of thirty Biden hadn’t got into the black. In What It Takes (1992), a breathless work of campaign stenography, Richard Ben Cramer described the confession Biden made to his aides before deciding to run: ‘The debts – he went through his finances whole, the mortgages, the credit cards. He was ...”

“... in many novelists today, particularly younger ones, who recognise the current literary value of a black world view but themselves possess cheerful, even sunny temperaments. They turn out The Good Companions in reverse, well aware that their escapist world will seem as convincing to today’s readers as Priestley’s did to subscribers in the Thirties. The ...”

“... was known to call his wife by the name of George’. These teachers may look formidable in their black gowns but they’re kindly enough, insisting on the spirit of fairness. Of course, as McEwan is keen to let his younger readers know, corporal punishment still took place in this era, and ‘the honourable thing was to take your beating with a look of ...”

“... smoke billowed over it like mourning crêpe. The sky was covered with clouds and hung heavy and black over the horizon. Here and there was a rift in the clouds through which a few pale stars peeked down like angel eyes watching over the solemn journey of the corpse. Pontoppidan’s discovery, if we judge it to be that and do not reduce it to older ...”

“... archives held in London: the Feminist Library in Peckham, the Women’s Library at the LSE, the Black Cultural Archives in Brixton and the Sisterhood and After collection at the British Library, which holds taped and sometimes filmed interviews with Women’s Liberation Movement activists, each of them around six or seven hours long. But we all know what ...”

“... to supper, Alan Sillitoe and his wife, the poet Ruth Fainlight, Arnold Wesker and his wife Dusty. Naomi Mitchison. Ted Hughes, Christopher Logue (whose recording of poetry and jazz, Red Bird, I’d bought with my pocket money at St Christopher’s), Lindsay Anderson, Fenella Fielding. A Portuguese couple, described to me as ‘a poet in exile and his ...”

“... affluent class that is more precisely observed in the Austrian than in the American version. And Naomi Watts and Tim Roth, two talented actors, render the wife and husband more sympathetic, more endearing, than they are in the Austrian version. Why should it be detrimental that the good guys are easier for us to identify with? Because our identification with ...”

“... or living in disguise as a monk and finding she’s charged with fathering a child. The Black Virgin Mountain near Saigon, once a shrine to a local nature divinity, had become a Marian shrine, as often happens to ancient holy places, and I decided to go there. The lower slopes were also home to the headquarters of the Cao Dai, the ...”

“... urge on me the attractions of the writer’s life, instancing the novels of Leo Walmsley or Naomi Jacob – even, going up the scale a bit, the Brontë sisters, whom she has never actually read, but thinks of as local girls who have kicked over the traces and made good Down South. The novelist and ex-Bingley librarian John Braine of Room at the Top fame ...”

“... He strode about, Day-Lewis remembered, ‘carrying a starting pistol and wearing an extraordinary black, lay-reader’s type of frock-coat which came halfway down to his knees’, and generally laying down the law: ‘he had theories about everything.’ He enunciated his sentences as though you could hear the capital letters, said Stephen Spender, who over a ...”

“... sometimes called her – took one look at the famous picture of Elizabeth Eckford, the lone Black girl on her way into school being yelled at by a line of hate-filled whites, and decided that the most important thing going on in it was what it said about negligent Black parents and ‘the equally absent ...”

“... lively, capable and becoming young woman’ to aspire to this. It doesn’t matter if she’s black or white or mixed race or Asian, gay or straight or basically anything, so long as she is hard-working, upbeat, dedicated to self-fashioning, and happy to be photographed clutching her A-level certificate in the Daily Mail. This young woman has been sold a ...”

“... It’s tit in some way, it’s an infantile comfort. It’s an infantile comfort that is also a black pit.In its time, the book has had its admirers – my battered 1970s paperback carries endorsements from Richard Hughes, Naomi Mitchison and C.S. Lewis, and Auden was an early fan. (Auden was a patron saint of lost ...”

“... was quite enjoyable because I liked hearing her hold forth, say, on the novels of Ethel Mannin and Naomi Jacob or about Jessie Matthews in Evergreen. On a really good day the subject would be some family matter – a bit of scandal or, better still, discreet criticism. But she could also be fascinating in the public domain. She was in especially good form on ...”