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“... confused with the actors who played them. The new retro cool I wallowed in had Philip Marlowe and Sam Spade as its source: the hard men with soft, democratic centres, American Romantics tinged with the Founding Fathers and Melville’s melancholic sense of humanity, the people’s Lancelots, who were dragged, flinching with distaste, into the dirty underworld ...”

“... consists of the black children of the island, whose schoolmasters, together with the rest of the white population, have fled. The children’s parents hope that Pop Eye’s version of school might distract the children from the rumours of atrocities committed by the redskin soldiers (‘redskin’ because the ‘soldiers looked like people leached up out of ...”

“... for the bulk of the population he became irrelevant. Forced to choose last year between cattle and Sam Johnson as a subject for commemorative stamps, the Post Office opted for rumination rather than reputation. Even our soap operas dwell on the working classes and the drab, not – as in the United States – on the rich, the gorgeous and the powerful. It ...”

“... of it raw, rude and abrasive. The sculptor George Segal made a career out of positioning life-size white plaster figures in furnished tableaux, so it’s a jolt to encounter one of his early works here, Reclining Woman Bas Relief: Nude (1958), a drippy hank of white plaster flung on a wooden plank which, hung on the ...”

“... Mrs Colne might be whirling and skipping from the dresser to the iron pots on the old Aga, Sam Grieve the keeper might be back from the woods with birds’ tail feathers as bright as an actress’s plumed hat. Bella at those times was at the sink, invisible in the gloom of the far side of the old kitchen. Her head peered into the sink and her hands ...”

“... In​ the original film noir, John Huston’s Maltese Falcon (1941), private investigator Sam Spade (Humphrey Bogart) visits criminal mastermind Kasper Gutman (Sydney Greenstreet) in his San Francisco hotel room to discuss the delivery of a mysterious ornament. The elevator attendant points him in the direction of Room 12c ...”

“... Kemp Powers’s play – but the cruellest remark is very discreet and goes unheard by the victim. Sam Cooke (Leslie Odom Jr) is singing at the Copacabana in New York, fulfilling a lifelong ambition. Rather than opening with one of his hits, he chooses a song he thinks appropriate to the venue. The song is called ‘Tammy’. The audience, exclusively ...”

“... stretches across a small valley and reaches up two hills to form ‘the red city’ and the ‘white’, so-called after the colour of the houses, nevertheless the pit and its surrounding industrial complex dominate the village, giving the area a harsh, dramatic appearance. Beyond the winding-gear of Grimethorpe colliery lie the slag-heaps, and in between ...”

“... Rosie Johnston, white and privileged; Edward Johnson, black and poor. For several months between 1986-1987 they shared the experience of imprisonment. Rosie Johnston was to emerge from HMP East Sutton Park in June 1987, having been sentenced to nine months for the possession of heroin and for supplying it to her friends at Oxford University (including a Cabinet Minister’s daughter ...”

“... and the rest of the book satirises types that can only be contemporary. In the first chapter Sam, a visiting US businessman, meets up with two Russian associates to discuss some unspecified but murky deal. The three tumble off a first-floor balcony, only to reappear in the distance as three mosquitoes flying towards the nearest village. This is only the ...”

“... His book, which Chua helped him to get published, is a kind of counterpart: why does the American white working class produce so many losers? Particularly dysfunctional, he argues, are his own people – the ‘Scots-Irish hillbillies’ who settled in Eastern Kentucky. He thinks that it wasn’t only his mother who ‘lacked even a modicum of temper ...”

“... the absurd saga of that staunch American couple, Virgil and Laraine, who have a daughter called Sam who is described as ‘feisty’, and a son called Hap who keeps on grinning his slow, rueful grin and quoting thoughtful bits out of the philosophy books he steals from the library. Beware of this boy: he is a psychopath, and on page 243 will pursue his ...”

“... two young sons. She is living with them in conditions of domestic comfort but emotional torpor in White Point, a fishing community north of Perth. A lot of things in both adults’ pasts lie undiscussed. Jim has not really come to terms with being the son of a domineering, dynastic father, and with losing his wife through cancer; Georgie has a history of ...”

“... birds migrate; heat-lightning flash photography in the strait, four lengths of a cold pool above a white city at sea; keen carols on Christmas Day with a lost tribe of Nigerian sans-papiers, bright migrants from hot Sahara to cold EU in the leafy English church Sam Beckett knew. I’d uncles down that way in the war years, a ...”

“... There’s an enviable clarity and forthrightness to Slimani’s writing, both in French and in Sam Taylor’s capable translation. A guy called Nicolas she meets in Madrid ‘had a hook nose and very nice hair. They had sex, stupidly. He kept pinching and biting her. She didn’t ask him to wear a condom. True, she was drunk, but she let him sodomise her ...”