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“... only when a kid breaks out some Star Wars figures. Harriet’s family’s shabby treatment of a black maid, which looks as though it’ll be the story’s secret centre, turns out to be little more than a milestone in the heroine’s personal development. The Goldfinch is even less interested in history and politics, reaching back to the private aesthetic ...”

“... exasperated white woman’, modelled on the Governor’s wife, determinedly scrubbing ‘a black baby in a wooden tub’ – he was banished to Sarah Island, charged with using a false name. It soon becomes clear that this penal colony is a fairly unusual place. The tortures and indignities are plausible enough: the prisoners are used as slave ...”

“... Welshman from its home university, Penry Williams, where the old one was entrusted to a Scot, J.B. Black, from Aberdeen. One mildly regrettable difference is the title. Black’s volume, The Reign of Elizabeth, was the only one to be devoted to a single reign except that about George III. Williams’s is called The Later ...”

“... she’s always conceived: in virginal white, waiting in her borrow’d likeness of shrunk death. Christopher Kane’s Lady Macbeth crouches in an evening gown, her hands full of red petals, looking more like Shelley’s beloved heaping rose leaves on the bed. If only it were Fuseli’s Lady Macbeth seizing the bloody daggers (his Titania and Bottom would ...”

“... there was always a subliminal status-pressure at work. In a recent review in the New Republic of Christopher Ricks’s T.S. Eliot and Prejudice, Irving Howe asks himself why he and his peer-group, who were ready enough to convict Ezra Pound of racialism, hesitated to attack Eliot in spite of his very crass and blatant attacks on ‘free-thinking ...”

“... except perhaps for one) were killed, and so never lived to know what I have known – the Beatles, black power, the Administration of Richard Nixon – all this has taken place in a trivial after-time and has nothing to do with anything that really mattered, with summer and someone hardly remembered, a youth so abruptly translated from vivid, well-loved (if ...”

“... one can be certain whether adults are speaking seriously, or think it funny if they are not. Christopher Logue who has compiled The Children’s Book of Comic Verse for Batsford, and Julia Watts in The Children’s Book of Funny Verse (Faber), have both grasped the essentials about a child’s sense of humour – far better than the 1935 editors of The ...”

“... The implication, perhaps, is that the 1980s were judged by the two editors, Leonard Michaels and Christopher Ricks, to be likely to rate correctness of language above its political and social implications, while the 1990s will reverse these priorities. There is little point in taking issue with this, since in practice such divisions don’t hold fast: most ...”

“... era up to the Renaissance, the condition was usually considered a sign of demonic possession, black magic or witchcraft. At best, it was evidence of a wicked character. (Kent to Oswald in King Lear: ‘A plague upon your epileptic visage!’) But there has probably never been a worse time in history to have epilepsy than the century beginning around ...”

“... member of the Wilson Front Bench who could stand up for a second to the icy brilliance of James, a black product of British colonialism who had come back to slay every kind of illusion, including the illusions of black nationalism and Soviet fraternal aid? At the back of the hall, I was happy to sell copies of a dissident ...”

“... elevated on a pedestal of Roman travertine, part of which held a reflecting pool lined in black glass.9 The building had a flat white roof, supported by eight slender chrome-painted columns and so appeared to float above glass curtain walls. It was expensively decorated, with partitions of green Tinian marble, etched glass and golden onyx that could ...”

“... to the NHS ward that serves as a site of spiritual desolation in Memento Mori (1959). In ‘The Black Madonna’, a story published in 1958, a Catholic couple’s creed, it’s suggested, is at odds with their materialist smugness, a smugness that’s given a very specific satirical colouring: The Parkers were among the few tenants of Cripps House who ...”

“... have recognised her Russians, starting with the first one she met, her violin teacher: Maxim wore black turtlenecks, played a mellow-toned, orange-coloured violin, and produced an impression of being deeply absorbed by considerations and calculations beyond the normal range of human cognition. Towards the end of one lesson, for example, he told me that he had ...”

“... 1853-56. Under the terms laid down by Britain and France in the Treaty of Paris, the waters of the Black Sea had been ‘formally and in perpetuity interdicted’ to the warships of Russia or any other power. The aim was to prevent Russia from threatening the Eastern Mediterranean or disrupting the British land and sea routes to India. But the political ...”

“... is to be gained by talk, particularly if it is stuffed with slogans about reductionism and holism. Christopher Wills is completely secure with genetic theory, and makes no attempt to belittle the beanbag model. The Wisdom of the Genes, a generally admirable book, suggests how modern genetics is leading evolutionary biologists away from the beanbag model, to ...”