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“... cut down on his drinking (which, during his BBC years, became something of a legend), to make his black moods more creatively purposeful, his love affairs more considered and considerate than perhaps they were. MacNeice’s twenty years of writing for radio are sometimes perceived as having wrecked his talent, directing him towards drawn-out, pretentious ...”

“... outside the old Daily Telegraph building in Fleet Street, walking down to the entrance of the big black palace, taking the lift up to the second floor, and bursting into the editor’s office just as the morning conference was about to begin. After explaining the circumstances to the astonished assembly, I intended to invite the editor to move over, plonk ...”

“... Parks. Now out on parole he has been given a new identity and must adopt the bland persona of Ian Wilkinson, a 20-year-old English student. Although Barker has left behind the vast historical rigging of Regeneration and its sequels – the preoccupations of the trilogy were still evident in her last novel, Another World – she has clearly drawn on real ...”

“... you fucking wanker, you cunt!’, or ‘Hoddle, you bleeding fairy!’, and so on. Black players still present something of a challenge – as in ‘You could have knocked it in with your lips, Crooks, you cunt’ – but by and large the crowds divide now into two groups: those who sing the current song, or chant the current chant (‘We’ll ...”

“... they call me “Shine”.’ In the Thirties a Shine or a Shiney was a derogatory white term for a black American: the song appropriates the word and turns it around, in much the same way in which Shabine, the narrator of ‘The Schooner Flight’ in Walcott’s The Star-Apple Kingdom (1979) rises above his own self-description as a nigger – I’m just a ...”

“... Ian Bell protests his disqualifications as a biographer rather too much: ‘I have approached Stevenson in the most unscholarly way. I am a journalist, and do not pretend to be anything else.’ But Bell, as he is at pains to point out, is a Scottish journalist and it is through the privilege of shared race and place of origin that he claims a blood-intimacy denied scholars ...”

“... for Zimbabwe’s descent into hyperinflation and poverty. The seizure of white-owned farms by his black supporters has been depicted as a form of thuggery, and as a cause of the country’s declining production, as if these lands were doomed by black ownership. Sanctions have been imposed, and opposition groups funded with ...”

“... have a giant inflatable banana in its collections or it would have been included in I Object: Ian Hislop’s Search for Dissent (until 20 January 2019) as Hislop’s personal contribution. In May 1989 Sonia Sutcliffe, wife of the Yorkshire Ripper, was awarded record-breaking libel damages of £600,000 against Private Eye. Standing outside the Royal Courts ...”

“... grotty warehouse where the band rehearsed; most striking are those showing the band’s singer, Ian Curtis, pale and brooding, lit by dusty light. Cummins also photographed the band standing in the snow down by the cathedral, and on a bridge overlooking Hulme, a huge 1960s housing estate. The four band members looked like refugees. Morrissey of The Smiths ...”

“... who would not be out of place in Chiswick or Cheltenham. But they are also home to many, white and black, who have, in their time, been involved in a lot of bloodshed. Now, with Harare, like the rest of the country, crumbling before your eyes, some of these men are willing to say what they know. It’s part of the general atmosphere of fin de règne. Mhanda ...”

“... arrangement of letters etc, which suggest the syllables of which it is made up’. In 1987, Ian Rankin’s novel Knots & Crosses introduced us to a tough Edinburgh Detective Sergeant called John Rebus. A series of local girls had been kidnapped and strangled. Rebus – 41-year-old drinker, ex-soldier, failed husband, absentee father, Christian, annual ...”

“... It involves a continuation of the politics of illusion, according to which some fifteen million black Africans are ‘justvisiting’ from Homelands that most of them have never seen, even though most whites realise that a large black urban proletariat is there to stay: after the revolt of 1976 they are not likely to ...”

“... our latest native industry. Just try finding a book on ‘the English identity’ in Foyle’s or Black-well’s. Bruce Arnold, a political commentator for the Irish Independent, has now added his contribution to this profusion, What Kind of Country, subtitled ‘Modern Irish Politics 1968-1983’.* This book was the subject of a particularly vitriolic review ...”

“... for Ian Jack Lying in bed in the dark without heating. December 3rd and feeling warm, almost too warm, I hear the window give that rattle-burp it only ever does when the wind is fierce outside. Black raindrops flame on the glass. Light from across the back gardens, one lone yellow oblong, someone up early on a winter morning ...”

“... some thing to do with Charles of that name, we conjecture, or perhaps it was Henry, C’s black-sheep brother, a figure whose curriculum vitae reads very like some of those that Amis has in store for us: pissed all the time, terrific sponger, no good at writing novels, and so on.) We are, however, vouchsafed a glimpse or two of Amis’s mother and ...”