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“... bald cone, and soils the windows. A plangently beautiful, one-off version of Annensky called ‘Black Spring’ merits quoting in full, but I will give just five lines of it: Now the dumb, black springtime must look into the chilly eye . . . from under the mould on the roof-shingles, the liquid oatmeal of the roads, the ...”

“... and writing, began to hang out together. In the summer of 1964, Jacqueline and their son Michael went to Long Island while Brian stayed in New York working on The Emperor of Ice-Cream. Frank Russell, who had won a Guggenheim for his nature writing, also left New York. Brian and Jean became lovers that summer, and not long afterwards Jacqueline and ...”

“... At the centre of Michael Cunningham’s new novel, in the second of its three tales, Cat, a black woman police investigator in New York, has the job of receiving and recording the calls of people threatening to blow themselves and others to pieces. Only because these deranged stories have become too familiar does she miss the one who really means it, a young boy, who, without forewarning or apparent motive, goes up to a stranger in Central Park, embraces him and explodes ...”

“... Letters of this date and from these regiments are notable, too, for their cryptic references to ‘black monkeys’, who seem to have been the Indian commissioned officers. Lance Dafadar Mahabat Ali Khan, another NCO, observed that ‘work in a cavalry regiment nowadays is not anything of a catch because of the harsh treatment meted out by the ...”

“... was four when World War Two began, so I followed its fortunes with the simple patriotic pride and black-and-white morality which belongs to childhood. Since my father was in the Air Force (as a musician who prudently avoided going up in an aeroplane even once), I took a special interest in that arm of the Services, became a fairly adept plane-spotter, and ...”

“... My little sister walks away from the crash, the black ice, the crushed passenger side, the eighteen-wheeler that destroyed the car, and from a ditch on the side of the highway a white plastic bag floating up out of the grass where the worms are working slow and blind beneath the ants that march in their single columns of grace like soldiers before they’re shipped out, before war makes them human again and scatters them across the fields and the sands, across stretchers and bodies, across the universe of smoke and ash, makes them crouch down in what’s left of a building while a tank moves up the street towards the river where it will stop, turn its engine off, the driver looking through a window smaller than an envelope, where he will sweat and think about how beautiful Kentucky is ...”

“... Mason, is particularly anxious, and his unscrupulous roust-about, Andy McKillop, who sees two black men visit Gemmy and talk with him, plays on these fears. There is a night raid. Gemmy is abducted, beaten, and only saved from drowning by Jock. He is removed to the care of a woman, Mrs Hutchence, the only one in the settlement who has a ‘real ...”

“... defence and science correspondent, Chapman Pincher. Out of the Express’s triumvirate of black-glass offices in London, Manchester and Glasgow came a torrent of newsprint that set the popular tone for the last days of imperial Britain, the ‘second Elizabethan age’ that was half-thrilled and half-terrified by Britain’s endeavours to build its ...”

“... the history of slavery, while the National Memorial for Peace and Justice commemorates the black victims of lynching in the American South between 1877 and 1950. For almost two decades the EJI and its executive director, Bryan Stevenson, have been fighting against the racial inequities of the American criminal justice system, and their legal trench ...”

“... Cambodian myth which recurs throughout the book locates the original crime much further back: the Black Lady. This woman apparently used her power of foresight to predict plots against the throne so that those whom she accused, even the King’s own relatives, could be executed the next day. The Black Lady makes several ...”

“... Amphitryon set in a parallel universe, introduces a line from Nietzsche.) As ‘Benjamin Black’, though, he’s shown himself willing to turn out workmanlike crime stories, and some of his best non-Black novels – among them The Book of Evidence (1989) and The Untouchable (1997) – add sinister plot elements to ...”

“... fully conceal. She observes ‘peacocks’ eyes of olive oil skimming atop the vinegar, dapples of black pepper and tawny streaks of mustard popped onto the biggest leaf of lettuce’. ‘Peacocks’ eyes’, ‘dapples’, ‘tawny’ – all signature notes of the mandarin sensibility of an Updike or Nabokov. Morvern’s voice has been praised for its ...”

“... by Alan Walker.* I was also reading – for amusement – the biography of Lytton Strachey by Michael Holroyd and one of Dorothy Parker by Marion Meade. In Holroyd’s book, I was most struck by some portraits – reproduced in full colour – that had been done of Strachey; there’s one by Simon Bussy, drawn in 1904 (the year of Isherwood’s ...”

“... a narc, called Tom Coleman. When the operation had finished, 47 Tulians, almost all of them black, found themselves in jail. At the outset, the bust seemed almost flawless. Coleman, the son of a Texas Ranger and a one-time ‘officer of the year’, had posed as a construction worker down on his luck, infiltrated the underworld of Tulia, and caught ...”

“... was no room for half measures. Compromise with an idol was a denial of God. In The Idolatrous Eye, Michael O’Connell tackles a more difficult question: why did the Puritans believe not just religious but all forms of theatre to be idolatrous? It’s not difficult to see why they disapproved of the great cycles of religious drama. Although the cycles were ...”