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“... stories. The Fire Next Time consists of a brief, hortatory letter to a young nephew about being a black American, and an eloquent memoir/meditation on the same subject, which includes an account of Baldwin’s childhood and of a visit to Elijah Muhammad, leader of the Black Muslim Nation in America. The ...”

“... drawn by Léon during his 30-year search. They were handed down to JMG in his father’s black case ‘in an old cardboard file tied up in string with the particularly vindictive inscription in my aunt’s writing: Worthless Papers’. We board a light plane to Rodrigues, 560 kilometres from Mauritius. There, I find that Anse aux Anglais (known ...”

“... In the course of five months, the portrait of Quappi went from ‘green and blue’ to ‘green, black and yellow’ to ‘blue, green and yellow’ to the final ‘grey’. The seated figure, outlined in black, upright, smoking, arms and legs crossed, is wearing an elegant pale grey hat and coat, against a ...”

“... his whole enterprise would have been seriously imperilled: This is what happened. On a calm, black night in June, 1941, Sergeant-Pilot Thomas Prosser was poaching over Northern France. His Hurricane 11B was black in its camouflage paint. Inside the cockpit, red light from the instrument panel fell softly on Prosser’s ...”

“... not mar the perfect symmetry of those walls,’ Fontaine says, and we peer through the trees at a black and jagged ruin, a Gothic scramble of turrets and mullioned windows. A fancy house, certainly, but more like Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast than anything evoking perfect symmetry. Is there something wrong with our narrator? It may be only that there was ...”

“... there was one. The idea of baseball is as strange to these Orthodox kids as the kids are to the black boys. How are they going to pick the teams? Black versus white, one of the children says. That’s out of the question, Murray says, and selects the mixed teams himself. What the film as a whole suggests in its easy-going ...”

“... Columbia, and at a low-level corporate job that followed, Obama brooded over his need to acquire a black identity – a sign was the copy of Ellison’s Invisible Man which he took with him everywhere. He had never thought of himself as black before. The two girlfriends of those years whom Maraniss has traced, and an unnamed ...”

“... on socialism, Richard Crossman’s Bagehot, would hardly have come out of Whitehall, and Michael Manley would not have found time to write a history of West Indian cricket which encompasses the social, economic and regional problems of the Caribbean if he had been engaged in trying to resolve them in their present manifestations. There is no way of ...”

“... up everybody, and ride to the sound of the guns,’ says the candidate. Wearing a black cowboy hat (‘I’m the bad guy’), Buchanan is defending American borders against the ‘foreign invasion ... that’s ... taking place when one, two, three million people walk across your border every year’. It doesn’t do to confuse illegal aliens ...”

“... at the time of their marriage and apparently determined to prove an old maid. Handsome, with huge black eyes, a wide rather sensuous mouth and what was known as a ‘beautiful carriage’, she did not look an old maid. ‘What nonsense is this,’ one of her sisters protested, ‘trying to be a bluestocking when you are meant to be a pretty woman.’ Though ...”

“... You’re not surprised.Because, when you’ve been here long enoughno one can make you believe the Black CatDream Book provides your winning number.Heaven answers your prayers with dust and you swallow it.Alone, early morning, on the Wyoming crosstown bus,you feel the need to destroy, like everyone else,as the doors open and no one comes on.(‘When You’ve ...”

“... normality itself has become a brutal, unforgiving enemy. There may be a link here to the use of black comedy to cope with unmanageable realities, and an accidental sequence of viewings brought this strongly to mind. One day I saw Luis García Berlanga’s The Executioner (1963), in which a young man becomes a public executioner in Spain: accommodation is ...”

“... Harry is needed for a redemptive real death at the end. Meanwhile a dollop of self-generating black plastic seaweed has fallen from another planet and taken up residence in Peter’s grotty little flat. This is a symbiotic substance, we learn from a handy scientist who analyses it, which enhances the natural characteristics of anyone it attaches itself ...”

“... Window; an extraordinary bit of cross-cutting between a dance scene in An American in Paris and a black-and-white film of an execution, followed by a repeated shot of an engraving, a Rembrandt self-portrait, black eyes staring, face frozen. This man really does seem to have seen what we have just seen. I’m naming names ...”

“... set in: Civil Rights, Vietnam and the Sixties. Liberals found themselves suddenly outflanked by black activists and student radicals, and the liberal consensus dissolved in acrimony. By the Reagan years, ‘liberalism’ had become a synonym for moral permissiveness and to run as a liberal was to court electoral suicide anywhere outside Manhattan or San ...”