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“... Yoshi kept coming to mind as I puzzled, eased, or intermittently ground and grinned my way through Michael Westlake’s 51 Soko – an ingenious, teasing, complex, at times impenetrable, often brilliantly parodic book, with a title that reads disconcertingly like a personal number-plate or a cosmetic preparation (‘51 Soko for firmer follicles’). It may be ...”

“... of a scholarly conspiracy, hinted at in the text, has recently been trumpeted by the journalists Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh in The Dead Sea Scrolls Deception, which is largely a popularisation of Robert Eisenman’s theories. Unsurprisingly, Baigent and Leigh contribute an effusive blurb to this book. Eisenman for his part has been putting himself ...”

“... Michael Walzer is one of America’s leading social critics, an editor of the magazine Dissent and the author of such books of political philosophy as Spheres of Justice, a systematic discussion of the nature of justice in society. In The Company of Critics he steps back from the activity of social criticism to reflect on the work of a number of other 20th-century social critics ...”

“... as villains. The star of London Weekend Television’s new Once a thief? is 22-year-old Michael Baillie, who began his criminal career as a burglar at the age of eight, and served his first borstal sentence at the age of 15. According to the Sunday Times, he originally wanted to play football for Aston Villa, but now he’s thinking of taking acting ...”

“... The tenth and central chapter of Michael Slater’s biography is entitled ‘Jerrold, Dickens, Thackeray’. This, as Slater reminds us (often), is the company his contemporaries expected Douglas Jerrold to keep. Some partisans might even have thought Slater right to put him first. Dickens and Thackeray were pall-bearers at Jerrold’s funeral and, according to their contemporary David Masson, ‘the three do form a triad so that it is hardly possible to discuss the merits of any one of them without referring to the other two ...”

“... sort of like going to Central Park’.I thought of Joe when I read about Christian Cooper, the black birdwatcher who crossed paths with a white woman and her dog in Central Park on the morning of 25 May, the same day George Floyd was killed when a police officer in Minneapolis knelt on his neck for nine minutes. There are ‘white spaces’ in Central ...”

“... snow in Gorky Park, Moscow and the sables let loose in the snow on Staten Island at the end – ‘black on white, black on white, and then gone’ – there are connections of cause and effect such as few crime novels have ever had to cope with. Gorky Park is a long novel because it tries to deal as fully with Moscow as ...”

“... relations with his orang-utang co-star; and his excursions into biography, Bird and White Hunter, Black Heart, are brave if lumbering. But what makes and keeps him a star, as actor and director, is a certain intimacy with screen violence, or with ways of representing violence. His Westerns and his cop movies are what continue to matter, and they provide the ...”

“... sharp-cut, well-complexioned face, with thin white hair and white Edwardian moustache and dark black eyebrows. In profile the head is remarkably elongated at the back. He wore a very dark-grey suit, with stiff upstanding collar folded right round the throat, and long stiff cuffs. He spoke for seventy minutes, and the applause at the end was fervent and ...”

“... in the woods. As I ate them, I thought of opossums and birds, and the antique Japanese prints in black and white, in which monkeys are eating persimmons in bare trees.’ To his young Cuban poet friend José Rodríguez Feo, for whom, admittedly, he played down the Puritan, he seemed not quite American (or at least not your average norteamericano): ‘To the ...”

“... War of Independence, his grandmother Phebe remembered that day differently. She had fainted when a Black man burst, axe in hand, into her bedroom: it was Frank, their loyal slave, warning her that the redcoats were on the way.Perhaps it was not just a distaste for activists but what he described to an acquaintance as his ‘mild natural colourphobia’ that ...”

“... tepid, stanked saltwater smells. The willows shimmy in the wind. Where else, As slugs crawl up, black gland on glistening gland, The moon-sharp hedge, could such a dumping ground, So gloom-engorged a cemetery be found? O strange girl-shadow, green and delicate, Pale green, a mouldering of the atmosphere, For what wan purpose are you wandered here, Who are ...”

“... In front of it at the Whitechapel is a circular glass case/ conference table, surrounded by black leather chairs. Among the archive material displayed is a picture of Clement Attlee speaking with Guernica behind him – the display of the picture in 1939 was organised in collaboration with the Stepney Trade Union Council. In the gallery alongside a new ...”

“... the valley below the station, is one of the best and most original of all Victorian churches. St Michael and All Angels is almost as impressive. It has a complicated building history: Bodley was responsible for the first church of 1858, Burges designed the additions which were completed by 1893. Its high, black and red ...”

“... as an MP he would have been a disaster. His vision of human nature is utterly two-dimensional and black-and-white, and his political opinions are dogmatically prescriptive – with an arrogance that only the wholly immature or innocent ever dare show. His world is full of goodies and baddies. The goodies spend all their time in the ‘forefront of community ...”