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“... indulge in orgies of this: ‘We consigned to the flames or the waves one Gunter Grass, two John Fowles, a Nabokov, a John Berger, three Doris Lessings, a Gore Vidal, two John Barths, and the whole of Jorge Luis Borges.’ This impatience with literary artefacts means that he and ...”

“... close of World War II. He attended Harvard, where he began a close friendship with his classmate, John Ashbery. After a year (1950-51) in Michigan writing and translating poetry, he moved to New York, where he rejoined his Harvard friends and their friends – among them the poets Kenneth Koch, James Schuyler and Barbara Guest – becoming part of a social ...”

“... fur and the fabric and the raised and knotted embroideries on the fabric, all of which melt into a brown mess on close examination, and only achieve form when one steps back. Oddly favourite is a portrait of the (unappealing) Pope Paul III in a faded rose-coloured cape enthroned on a worn velvet chair, the supreme pontiff just a lay figure there to demonstrate ...”

“... like Peter, Juba is an Eldorado: he earns three times more here than he could at home.Outside the John Garang mausoleum, a vast empty lot surrounded by a tall iron fence with gilded spikes, I suddenly find myself swallowed up in a swarming crowd. All along the fence, thousands of people are patiently waiting in line. In the street, among policemen and ...”

“... in the freedom struggle. The four political assassinations that define the 1960s – those of John and Robert Kennedy, Malcolm X and King – stand in for the very large numbers (almost all black and lost to national public memory) martyred to racial justice. It is now a commonplace that, instead of protecting Southern civil rights workers, the FBI (with ...”

“... Qabbala, or even claim to have inspected and made sense of the symbolism of the Revelations of St John of Patmos. Dukes was also sexually attracted to Stone – or Stone had been born yesterday if Dukes was not. Dukes had terribly vulnerable eyes which when they were hurt would fade over and grow misted with an affecting desolation. It takes a desperate man ...”

“... the wrong side. True it was possible to get out of it by inching slowly forward, on one’s fat brown rump, to the foot; but that, for some reason, often woke both of them ... ’ Syed Omar, we find, is tight-wedged between his sleeping wives – ‘most irregular, uncleanly, contrary to the strict Islamic custom’. Strict Christian custom, likewise, is ...”

“... you will occasionally have seen people half-clothed in filthy rags, hair matted with the red-brown dust thrown up from the laterite earth, wandering the streets largely unmolested; talking, perhaps, to themselves; begging sometimes; or scratching through rubbish heaps looking for something to eat. When I was a child in Kumasi we were taught to fear these ...”

“... did not appear until 1837 and was quickly supplanted by two popularising and very popular works, John Forster’s The Life and Adventures of Oliver Goldsmith (1848) and Washington Irving’s Life of Oliver Goldsmith (1849). Forster and Irving built on Prior’s research to reinstate – affectionately, but still damagingly – the simple, unworldly ...”

“... market – was playful rather than integral to his message. The co-architect of New Labour, Gordon Brown, went a few steps further, attempting to rehabilitate Smith, not without some plausibility, as a proponent of ‘the helping hand’. In part this manoeuvre was prompted by local piety, for Brown was brought up and has ...”

“... Between 1938 and 1940, the Italian-American writer John Fante published three books. The first two – Wait until Spring, Bandini (1938) and Ask the Dust (1939) – were novels; the third, Dago Red (1940), was a collection of short stories. All three were well received. Ask the Dust disconcerted some of its reviewers, but Bandini was admired by James Farrell and Steinbeck praised Dago Red ...”

“... that day at the crimes of England and her associated military reprobates. One who did so was Major John C. Spahr, an executive officer with Marine Fighter Attack Squadron 323, based at Marine Corps Air Station Miramar in San Diego, but serving during the spring of 2005 in the Persian Gulf on the USS Carl Vinson. Major Spahr was 6 feet 3 inches tall and did a ...”

“... a matter of natural and wholesome professional sympathies. Stella Tillyard is married to historian John Brewer who helped Schama with Citizens, as the author warmly acknowledges in the Introduction; and there is further scholarly harmony in the fact that Tillyard, in her Preface, shows that she agrees with the views of Schama, and, increasingly, others, about ...”

“... at once floral and, again, classical (Delphine is ‘statuesque’ and, even better, ‘pale’). John James Todd’s lover in The New Confessions is called Doon, an odd, intractable name, one which gives Todd the chance both to dream of some shared Celtic origin and to call her by a (real) name which is shared by no other woman and which kicks up all sorts ...”

“... nor connected with lineage: King Louis XI of France was described by a German viewer as ‘brown’. Groebner tells us that ‘the skin colours that European travellers caught sight of in various parts of the New World in the 16th century coincided with those they employed to describe their own skins.’ Only well after the 16th century, Groebner ...”