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“... the form of my wanting to wrestle them at sleepovers, slowly but inexorably, through the use of black magic, turning them into lumberjack lesbians. No, I had not misremembered. After the patchwork stiltedness of his first published novel, 1958’s The Poorhouse Fair, Updike unrolls himself over the landscape of his boyhood like a vast horripilating ...”

“... I spent hours making those skirts for you two little rips – – They’re stupid, said Linda.    She hadn’t meant to say that. She knew she’d made a mistake but she hated those skirts, especially her own one.    Veronica roared. – Aaah!    The hours she’d wasted; cutting, clipping, sewing, making mistakes, starting ...”

“... when it came out in 1964 in a City Lights edition uniform (except that it was blue and red, not black and white) with Ginsberg’s Howl, Kaddish and Reality Sandwiches. Two years later O’Hara was dead, killed by a dune buggy at an all-night party on Fire Island. There was something Keatsian about his poetry, its vividness and particularity, and its ...”

“... began with the signature poem, ‘Her Kind’: I have gone out, a possessed witch haunting the black air, braver at night; dreaming evil, I have done my hitch over the plain houses, light by light: lonely thing, twelve-fingered, out of mind. A woman like that is not a woman, quite. I have been her kind. The poem ends with an allusion to Dreyer’s Joan of ...”

“... almost always brightly coloured, though the colours seldom correspond to those found in nature: a black man is assigned pink skin, Gilbert and George are themselves given red faces, and so on. The images are composites of photos of all sizes, the sizes seldom reflecting relative dimensions in the real world (a flower is shown as bigger than a human face, a ...”

“... and 1978, is offered both as ‘a unique and remarkable memoir’ and as a revelation of ‘how a black and his family suffer the daily reality’ of the system of Apartheid. Yet each raises questions concerning their representativeness, their literalness and their significance. Jean Fagan Yellin’s admirable edition of Jacobs’s story is mainly ...”

“... what I yearned for was truth.’Enninful took the top job at Vogue in 2017 and became the first black editor in the magazine’s history. Ending the overwhelming whiteness on its pages was central to his pitch: ‘We would not be exclusive and proscriptive,’ he writes, ‘but inclusive, on every page … Diversity and inclusivity were at the forefront of ...”

“... is in music what you are in painting.’ Renoir is seen as having lost his nerve. According to Linda Nochlin, ‘after the bold attempt of Impressionism to eradicate the past and create an art modern in both its formal strategies and its subject matter’, Renoir and others, ‘dissatisfied with the openness, instability and vivid contemporaneity ...”

“... the trilogy, he appraises potential hook-ups like items on a supermarket shelf: ‘Big, beefy. Black bomber jacket, black T-shirt, black 501s, black slicked back hair. Beautiful face. Big mouth, badly shaven, glittering eyes.’ The commodification ...”

“... was temerarious to a degree to tour the Soviet Union by car in the Sixties, from the Baltic to the Black Sea, and would still be no picnic trip. All grist to a writer, of course. It is a pleasure to find him establishing himself as a novelist, receiving film offers and spending his frozen royalties in the Eastern bloc. Yet he still said yes to invitations ...”

“... tea party, inviting a (carefully curated) collection of guests.Writing about Stettheimer in 1980, Linda Nochlin called her a ‘Rococo subversive’. It might have seemed like a joke, but she meant it. Barbara Bloemink’s new biography continues in Nochlin’s provocative spirit. According to Bloemink, Stettheimer was a social documentarian whose work looks ...”

“... magnificent: but it needs a lot of thinking about after the dazzlement is over. Brian Levack and Linda Levy Peck write about the reign of James I, a subject to which Professor Hexter returned recently with a devastating attack on the so-called ‘revisionists’: those who believe either that the English Civil War was an accident with no causes at all or ...”

“... him a wind-up gramophone).In 1966, more than 40 per cent of the singles sold in Britain were by Black artists, many of them on Motown Records. Local doo-wop groups were recruited from street corners and sock-hops and given in-house lessons in deportment; it was crucial to present an image of Blackness that could attract a mainstream audience. The ...”

“... Wilson wrote, ‘and sought to answer James Baldwin’s call for a profound articulation of the Black tradition that could sustain a man once he left his father’s house.’With what he called his ‘anthropological eye’, Wilson set out to dramatise the ‘dazed and dazzling … rapport with life’ which allowed African Americans to navigate a white ...”

“... showings. Not unlike Les Diaboliques (which was quite as disturbing) in several ways, Psycho was a black and white, low-budget horror movie which for cheapness – in both senses – was filmed by a television crew, while being directed by the A-listed Alfred Hitchcock, by then responsible for huge and glossy Hollywood hits like Rebecca, To Catch a Thief and ...”