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“... with which the Hanburys deliver such lines as ‘I need somebody to fucking fuck me!’ or ‘white wine is a non-alcoholic drink,’ he seeks out and marries a woman called Rebecca, whose parents, Rick and Ali, are similarly pseudo-bohemian types. But Michael and Rebecca’s marriage starts to fray when they have a child, Hamish, who as a baby resembles ...”

“... like an unnatural intellectual Pasha visiting his Circassian Hareem’. Brooke, in a white shirt and white flannel trousers, took charge of a punting trip on the Cam. ‘Oh yes,’ he said later, ‘I did the fresh, boyish stunt, and it was a great success.’ James sent thanks to all concerned, ‘with a ...”

“... The Olcester Hudsonite, The Las Vegas Review and The Gleaner. 100% HUMAN HAIR declared a sign on Christopher. We saw a president declare a war in the TV store in Union Square. The Oregon Emerald, The Forty-Niner, The Panther and The Pine Bluff Commercial, The West Plains Daily Quill, The Kingman Miner, The Point and The Wichita Eagle. In Gramercy Park I ...”

“... The American artist Christopher Wool’s large abstract paintings are often beautiful, but they are so emptied of content that it is at first hard to know what to make of them. For the first ten years or so after he came to attention in the mid-1980s, he was considered an artist’s artist: he didn’t have a large public following or much of an international reputation ...”

“... the closing years of the Smith-run settler dictatorship. Worsthorne was hanging out with real white trash like P.K. Van der Byl, Smith’s kinkily sadistic deputy, and Richard Cecil, the brave but dim-bulbed scion of the Salisburys. We met in Meikles bar and had a very frank chat, in the course of which Worsthorne said that while he could easily look ...”

“... szszszsz.’ Sometimes Billy zones out entirely and there’s a sprinkling of words on white space: ‘currj’, ‘double y’im dees’, ‘Sod’m’, ‘Eye-rack’, ‘Eaaaar-rock’, ‘soooh-preeeeme sacrifice’ – the concrete poetry of ‘freeman moxy’, as Steve Bell’s Bush used to call it. Billy gets cornered by these speakers, then ...”

“... further reproduction of his shameful imaginings’). This time there’s a plot: the young (white) lesbian wife of a grand, gay (white) Southern poet runs off with her infant daughter and conceals herself from his inquiries by passing as a black lone parent. The racial caste system in rural Virginia being what it ...”

“... love. I have never ceased to love her from that moment.’ The person who said that was known as Christopher St John, though her real name was Christabel Marshall. We know how she felt about the object of her passion, Vita Sackville-West, because she kept a ‘love-journal’ in Vita’s honour. Miss Sackville-West, who had recently (and most unusually) been ...”

“... the ornate silver mirror which is flanked by ornate silver candelabra giving off inconsequential white light. There are two symmetrically placed bowls containing pomegranates and pears. In front of them, hand-embroidered pouches filled with tiny white candies, decorated with blue gauze and scraps of silk. There are eggs ...”

“... final eavesdropping.No need of manna when the actual is marvellous, our conversation     a white tablecloth spread outLike a book of manners in the wilderness.Likewise, the word ‘implicated’ is consciously innocent in Heaney: implicated, not in wrongdoing, but as the plaiting of the harvest bow. Heaney’s resourcefulness is astonishing, not least ...”

“... Mrs Lincoln didn’t go on to marry a bulbous Levantine entrepreneur. Nor did she summon Theodore White for an interview and, slyly determined to ‘own’ the first draft on history, confide in him that her late husband had a special fondness for a corny musical about King Arthur. But, as a staunch Camelot-scoffer all my life, I was in for a huge shock when ...”

“... are authoritatively considered by Desmond Rice and Arthur Gavshon. In Paragraph 110 of HMG’s own White Paper, ‘The Falklands Campaign: The Lessons’, we read: ‘On 2 May, HMS Conqueror detected the Argentine cruiser, General Belgrano, accompanied by two destroyers, sailing near to the total exclusion zone.’ This was the scenario presented to us, not ...”

“... to ‘a’? Quoting the same sentence in his preface to the full set of new translations, Christopher Prendergast writes: ‘all paradises are lost paradises.’ This is impeccably aphoristic, and assumes that false paradises are just not paradises at all. Proust himself could be more accommodating, and at one point implies that almost anything may be ...”

“... In Arthur Schlesinger’s court history, A Thousand Days: John F. Kennedy in the White House, which might without unfairness be called the founding breviary of the cult of JFK, there appears the following vignette. Schlesinger had been asked to carpenter a ‘White Paper’ justifying Washington’s destabilisation of Cuba, in which the high-flown rhetoric of the New Frontier might form a sort of scab over the fouler business of empire ...”

“... on a bridge to light his pipe and look over his shoulder, the whole scene held in grainy black and white. Here a world of crime and mystery was about to unfold, but in a special inflection of the thriller genre that kept thrills to a minimum. Then along came Bond and Bondery, the fast-moving, sex-drenched and gadget-packed fantasy of the new Cold Warrior. I ...”