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“... with more medals than the scales of a fish’, wears boots with built-up heels like Eugene Terreblanche of the AWB. He meets up with his mysterious friend Walker who delights in new trades and scams: with the fall of the USSR Walker’s got a hoard of busts of Lenin and Stalin which he believes he can sell in South Africa – it’s the last ...”

“... written like this), until it started to serve him less well, and the long history of collapses, black-outs and hospitalisations began. His first hospitalisation was in 1936, and there were to be very many more before his death in 1962; he survived seizures of an intensity that might well have been expected to be fatal; he had a blackout that lasted for two ...”

“... novel, ‘I owe everything to memories of my mother and her struggle.’ The American cover has a black and white photograph of a boy and a woman in bed, their foreheads touching in a maternal embrace. (On the British cover, a boy sits on a post that looks not unlike a cross.) Much of the story is excruciating, and it is in a long line of books with trauma as ...”

“... Werkbund, which British architects and students seldom know by any English name. The Unhappy Eugene is Toller’s play Hinkemann, sometimes known in English as Brokenbrow but here literally and unidentifiably translated from its Russian title of the Twenties. The Big Playhouse is Reinhardt’s Grosses Schauspielhaus. ‘The Reichswehr divisions in ...”

“... at the 1893 World’s Fair in Chicago, they performed as the Houdini Brothers: with their thick black hair and swarthy complexions they didn’t really look French, but Italian maybe. Harry made himself up as a yogi, dressed in white robes and wearing brown facepaint. He sat cross-legged on a mat, sprinkled seeds into a shallow dish of soil and began to ...”

“... mistress, a young widow named Pacifica Brandino, who bore him a child in 1511 – the funereal black veil which covers the Mona Lisa’s hair might allude to her widowhood. And there is the beautiful Isabella Gualanda, who was in Rome at the right sort of time; who is mentioned suggestively in de Beatis’s diary on the day after his visit to Leonardo; and ...”

“... point, which Miller doesn’t make but seems just as important, is that there was no tradition of black abolitionism in France, nothing like the public-speaking circuits and abolitionist press that produced such figures as Frederick Douglass and Olaudah Equiano.) There is no equivalent of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Miller writes, ‘no singularly influential ...”

“... photograms, animation – drawn from the avant-garde. As the opening text fades, a series of black and white images of droplets appear, radiating waves that are sped up, slowed down, superimposed. The shadow of a hand enters the frame, circles of light bulging as its fingers break the water’s surface. The effect is hard to parse. It looks surreal but ...”

“... man of commanding presence, great courage and colossal physical strength: it was said that ‘the Black Devil’ could hold four rifles at the end of his outstretched arm, one finger in each barrel. In Egypt in 1799 he quarrelled with Napoleon, accusing him of putting personal ambition before Revolutionary principles; he was sent home. On the way, his ship ...”

“... Something is made of Helena Landless’s aptitude for dressing up and something of ‘that great black scarf’ which, as Dickens’s Jasper pulls it off and loops it round his arm, makes his face ‘knitted and stern’. Mr Garfield invents an amusingly lightweight Datchery, who is not any of the other dramatis personae in disguise. But when the ...”

“... Manchette was asked about his first encounter with detective fiction, he mentioned a scene from Black Wings Has My Angel by the American writer Elliott Chaze. Originally published in 1953, this obscure lovers-on-the-run thriller was only available, until recently, in French translation.*She was sitting on the floor, naked, in a skitter of green bills ...”

“... Hope joins the team on the Grosso Arvore Research Centre directed by the celebrated primatologist Eugene Mallabar. After over twenty years in the field he knows more about the society of wild chimpanzees than anyone else. His books – The Peaceful Primate, Primate’s Progress – are famous, and the final summa of his great work is in ...”

“... penser à cette lignée terrible et maudite: Maldoror, Rimbaud.’ He has given us a new set of Black Paintings reimagined by a cackling van Gogh. ‘Skeletons Fighting for the Body of a Hanged Man’ (1891) And yet there is tenderness in Ensor – an unmistakable fellow feeling for his marionettes. He would be an immensely lesser artist (as would ...”

“... at a reading ‘before thousands’ in the Boston Public Garden: She entered with a black coat and black jacket and a diamondy green dress. The cloak came off, then after slight hesitation the jacket, then another pause and the cloak went on again. She had her audience. Each obstruction fell into her hands: a ...”

“... who always seemed to be standing in the bushes when I left the house, and an obese one-eyed black cat, who used to come in through my bedroom window. It had one green eye and one empty socket, and the minute it saw me with its single eye, it would start running from room to room, uttering piercing meows and crashing into the furniture. There was a lot ...”