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“... to olfactory life: soup buns full of crab meat and pork, drunken shrimp, radish-shred cakes, white jade tofu with spring onion and sesame oil. But the tea houses and dumpling vendors beloved by city workers are about to disappear as the restaurant system – once subsidised by the government – falls prey to high rents and the capitalist bottom ...”

“... word “love”,’ Billie Holiday says in her memoir Lady Sings the Blues (written in 1956 with William Dufty and now reissued). Like Kafka’s hunger artist, Holiday let song make a spectacle of her deprivation. ‘I don’t need a friend/My heart is broken, it won’t ever mend/I ain’t much carin’/Just where I will end,’ she sang in ‘I Must Have ...”

“... sentiment (wild geese and all), or the counterweight Protestant myth in Northern Ireland in which William III for ever rides a white horse. The interest of the Scottish sample of such beliefs lies in the fact that Scottish myths are not an expression of either successful or of frustrated nationalism. They mostly involve ...”

“... respect it is an unfortunate title, suggesting an item from the cast-list of almost any black-and-white film about almost any celebrity, but in the respect that it makes a point of Rebecca West’s youth, it is a good title. The first article is signed by her natural name, Cicily Fairfield: she was so young that she had not yet yielded to whatever weakness it ...”

“... it is worse than that. They all knew what they ought to do. They kept on spelling it out, in every White Paper and Cabinet minute. But they could never face doing it. In 1951, 20 per cent of all public expenditure and nearly 8 per cent of GDP went on defence. The incoming Tory foreign secretary, Anthony Eden, back in his old post, told the Cabinet in June 1952 ...”

“... are created unequal, the United States has attempted to come to terms with its longue durée of white supremacy only twice in its history. The first effort, made by black and white abolitionists in the period of nationalist expansion, and caught up in the conflict between slave and free labour modes of production, brought ...”

“... Logic’s necessity is more profound. It’s impossible for a contradiction like ‘Snow is white and snow is not white’ to be true, and this necessity seems absolute. ‘Laws of logic’ don’t function like laws of nature, keeping reality in line, since if they did we could ask why those laws could not be ...”

“... spines, nut-brown at the base, rising to a strip of black and changing at the very tip to purest white. When threatened, they roll into an impenetrable ball, which deters almost all animals with the exception of badgers, and us: Pliny wrote that you could unroll them by sprinkling boiling water on their backs, which, unlike his dietary information, does seem ...”

“... When We Were Orphans (reviewed in the LRB, 5 October and 13 April) are quoted at 2-1 and 5-2 with William Hill. And it’s difficult to fancy the four other shortlisted novelists. Trezza Azzopardi’s The Hiding Place – the 7-1 outsider and the only first novel on the list – is narrated by Dolores Gauci, a young girl whose Maltese father gambled away his ...”

“... gawping or grinning towards their left, and all perfectly in focus. ‘Big Face in Crowd’ by William Klein (1955). William Klein’s Big Face in Crowd is a ravishing instance of a compositional effect, not quite a trick, he used in street photographs of that period. It is partly a result of the wide-angle lenses ...”

“... and there’s a narrow frieze just below the ceiling. The pattern seems to have been inspired by a William Morris design for Swan House in Chelsea. Parr, an artisan decorator for the Cambridge firm F.R. Leach, was among the people who implemented Morris’s designs at Swan House and elsewhere. He also brought them home. F.R. Leach specialised in a process ...”

“... says: ‘How do you do?’ He replies: ‘Well, that’s a big question.’ Asked if he knew William Randolph Hearst’s mistress, Marion Davies, he says yes – ‘if anyone did’. When Houseman worries about being fired, Mank says, ‘I’ve never not been fired,’ as if confirming an earlier remark that ‘every moment of my life is ...”

“... number of fancy cars they have. Others are worried that progress will make them less Indian, more white. This isn’t quite what happens, and we should note, at this point, that three out of the four men mentioned above are Caucasian and the fourth is a Native American.The film’s storyline begins when the second of the quarrelling men, Ernest ...”

“... Their importance may rather be that they make it hard to distinguish between the two Empsons, the white-coated technocrat and the plain man costumed in tweedy prejudices. They suggest that, far from shelving his prejudices when he turned to literature, Empson used those prejudices to colour his arguments. Empson felt that history had made him an old ...”

“... the heroine, is in. She does not talk much and she feels like a fantasy figure. Only the scenes in white-ruled South Africa are presented naturalistically. The lusus naturae of the title seems to be Hillela, not apartheid. For one-third of the book, Hillela is living in South Africa or at boarding-school in Rhodesia, under the care of her two aunts, for her ...”