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“... sentence. Five minutes or so in that pulpit kept me high for days. Yet Obama, brought up by his white mother as a secular humanist, was a stranger to black religion until he went to Chicago in 1984, to take up a job as a trainee community organiser. His boss prepped him at his interview in New York: ‘If poor and working-class people want to build real ...”

“... a better life like the other tribes in Sarawak … Stop being arrogant and thinking that it is the white man’s burden to decide the fate of the peoples in this world. As the American journalist Carl Hoffman writes in his dual biography of Manser and the American collector of Dayak art Michael Palmieri, ‘Bruno, in ...”

“... in 1988, was a dress rehearsal for the Third Way politics that would send Bill Clinton to the White House four years later. Its failure is usually attributed to Biden’s lifting of passages from a speech by Neil Kinnock about his working-class upbringing, but in fact he was following his mother’s advice when he dropped out. ‘The wounded, limping ...”

“... its total commitment to free trade and institute a system of imperial protection. Britain and its (white) colonies would be organised into a mutually reinforcing and enriching economic bloc, finally capable of standing up to their international competitors (which had long since put up their own tariffs while ruthlessly exploiting Britain’s openness and good ...”

“... other three – the barely tolerated ones – were Golo, born in 1909, Monika, born in 1910, and Michael, born in 1919. Erika remembered a time during the shortages of the First World War when food had to be divided but there was one fig left over. ‘What did my father do? He gave this fig just to me alone . . . the other three children stared in ...”

“... of sulphate aerosols in Greenland ice cores fell in the 1990s. A British scientist, Professor Michael Grubb of Imperial College, London, first suggested that these two unlikely successes might become the models for a worldwide assault on global warming. Guilty gases could be identified, targets and times negotiated for their reduction, and nations coming ...”

“... she favoured black silk cloaks and trousers, tricorn hats, blood-red lipstick and cadaverish white face-powder – Tallulah Bankhead was not the only acquaintance to nickname her ‘Countess Dracula’. Yet such was de Acosta’s sinister allure she managed to bed just about everybody who was anybody in the sapphic world of her time: from Isadora ...”

“... me. Everywhere dog shit dogs must have important freedom to shit everywhere. With a flash of wide white cuff, he taps the page of figures on Harry’s desk. Too much disorder. Too much dog shit. Pay by end of August, no prosecution for criminal activities. But no more Toyota franchise at Singer Motors. Japanese perplexity awakening to contempt dismisses ...”

“... a little thunderous, but not to the point of Mannerism, nor are his figures as stagey-grotesque as Michael Ayrton’s were. His line and colour are tart – compared with illustrations commissioned for cookery books today, almost brutal – but the world they create is welcoming. Before market research quantified the effectiveness of commercial art, and fine ...”

“... for his own work, and the start of an important – perhaps his most important – friendship. Michael Ramsbotham was also a writer, five years younger than Henry Reed, and from a more privileged background. After Charterhouse, from which he was expelled, he went up to King’s College, Cambridge. At the end of his second year, in June 1940, he was called ...”

“... the most prominent prize for first novels in Australia; it was described by David Marr, Patrick White’s biographer, as ‘astonishingly talented’, and by Jill Kitson of the ABC as ‘a searingly truthful account of terrible wartime deeds that is also an imaginative work of extraordinary redemptive power’. Assuming, as we all did, that the novel ...”

“... converting a house for their retirement. The Greens are so entirely married they even look alike: white-haired, spry, with candid blue eyes. They will prove Monti’s pattern only partial, for in their case it’s the dream house that’s going to crumble, not the dream itself, which is the fabric of their relationship. They’re wrestling ineptly with ...”

“... not be allowed to put one off reading it. All the economic reasons for not producing black and white pocket catalogues are obvious, and I own and pore over illustrated art books. But I am also sure that paintings sometimes need to be defended from apparatus which seems to celebrate them, but really confuses the relationship which matters most – that ...”

“... who speaks of ‘a witness to the truth, not of God, but of our unwillingness for God’: reading Michael Edwards’s statement in multi-racial Britain in 1985, I wonder at its exclusive, ethnically-biased use of ‘our’ and ‘God’. Edwards employs the words in a manner which assumes the existence of a white Christian ...”

“... His sentences are as pungent and as full of character as his music’ etc) and as described by Michael Tanner in the letter pages of this journal as ‘the greatest English prose of our time, I think’ (LRB, 3-16 February 1983), is Craft’s prose. Craft’s essayistic prose is indistinguishable from what is ostensibly Stravinsky’s in his answers to ...”