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“... produced by women lepers who fled to the Caucasus and coupled with jackals? Do surnames like Dunn, Grey and Douglas, and place-names like Dublin and Blackpool, indicate concealed African origins? Were the Mende people of West Africa the first to navigate to Peru? Did Egyptians build Stonehenge? Is Aids the outcome of a genocidal white conspiracy to eliminate ...”

“... into sullen silence. After one o’clock the shops are closed, strike-bound, hidden behind grey metal shutters scarred with graffiti and blots of paint. An old woman dressed in black shuffles past. Streaks of grey hair escape from her tightly-wound scarf, flying like wisps of smoke in the wind. She’s carrying a ...”

“... A father​ is a necessary evil,’ Stephen Dedalus says in Ulysses. In Yeats: The Man and the Masks, Richard Ellmann quoted Ivan Karamazov: ‘Who doesn’t desire his father’s death?’ ‘From the Urals to Donegal,’ Ellmann writes,the theme recurs, in Turgenev, in Samuel Butler, in Gosse. It is especially prominent in Ireland ...”

“... the spectral blot representing a portion of the Lower Lea Valley, shrouded in surrounding folds of grey, reminds me of the Hoo Peninsula, a secretive landscape at the mouth of the Thames Estuary. I should be out there now. I have been brooding on Peter Ackroyd’s notion that the Thames is a river like the Ganges or the Jordan, a place of pilgrimage, a source ...”

“... one must discriminate. They are trash, husks of people spat out by fate … [How] did that small grey woman come to stand for a quarter of an hour beside me before a shop window while showing me an old, long pencil that protruded with infinite slowness from her filthy, closed hands? I acted as if I were looking at the goods displayed and didn’t notice ...”

“... clerk, examining the author’s credit card in Seattle, asked him if he was related to the poet Stephen Spender. Assured of his customer’s identity, the clerk expressed his pleasure: ‘Gee, a near-celebrity.’ No doubt the status of full celebrity was reserved for movie stars and ball-players. At any rate there is little doubt that Spender is the most ...”

“... have never been given sex quite like this before). Roughly halfway​ through The Lesser Bohemians Stephen tells his story to Eily (it takes seventy pages). It is his confession – although the content could not be more different, the allusion to Stavrogin’s confession prepared the ground. Since they are named for the first time after he has done so, the ...”

“... Dardanelles. The duty to amuse oneself did not slacken with the approach of war. When Sir Edward Grey went to Number Ten with Haldane and Crewe bringing news of the German declaration of war on Russia, ‘he found the PM and ladies playing bridge – and Lord Crewe said it was like playing on top of a coffin. They waited till they had finished – about an ...”

“... tailored garments in black and white, red, greige (Armani’s trademark, a subtle mixture of grey and beige) or romantic floral prints, are accompanied by text comparing them to the paintings of Ad Reinhardt, Rothko and Matisse. At the same time, the catalogue stresses power and money: ‘To acquire an Armani suit has become a right [sic] of passage, a ...”

“... a lean back into deep woods, licking from their fingers, and smiling, the remains of purple-grey bread pudding, the sweet fat.’ By this stage, in the reader’s mind as in Frank Harland’s, the ritual gorging of the end-of-week bread-pudding by Frank and his father and brothers has become one of the symbols through which the animal warmth and ...”

“... a sixth-century Greek urn, immobilising tigers with a tranquilliser rifle and shooting a grey whale with a crossbow, all put together by a PR staff in order to embellish what an American diplomat called Putin’s ‘alpha dog’ image. Until now, rigged elections have functioned in the same way. It takes only modest administrative capacity to rig an ...”

“... ascriptions are four to POUND. Final detail, the earlier editions had those rather sombre blue-grey typographical dust-wrappers, didn’t they? The new issue has a daffodil-coloured, megalopygic, copper-nobbed, saffron-robed, pre-Raphaelite stunner walking barefoot through brambles following a handsome lion and his lioness, and admired by a ...”

“... write about dysfunctional families, miserable, loveless lives, illness, old age, winter, the grey weather, boredom and rain.’ Ulysses, the work of a man who once remarked that he had a mind like a grocer’s assistant, plucks great art from total tedium. It is a relentlessly trivial book, but by levelling everything down it manages to make everything ...”

“... The Red Badge of Courage​ is generally the only thing about Stephen Crane that readers remember now. The novel, first published in 1895 when Crane was only 23, is short and centres on the battlefield experience of a man younger still, Henry Fleming, who worries that in the test of war he will prove a coward, and then does ...”

“... was it merely a reflection of the far more powerful and evil megawattage sweeping the Continent? Stephen Dorril’s intertwined biography of Mosley and British Fascism is exhaustive but easy-paced and entertaining, judicious – and damning. We shall not need another. He says pretty well everything that needs to be said, working his way carefully through all ...”