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“... Enrico Donati’s small painting White to White features an aggressively encrusted pale rectangle with a second rectangle – black, white and brown – in its top left corner. Dated 1953, fairly early for such deliberately coarse abstraction, the painting landed in the collection of the famously plain-spoken art critic Clement Greenberg ...”

“... the job as leader of the Labour Party and already he wasn’t doing it right. What colour poppy, white or red, would he wear to the Cenotaph on Remembrance Day? Would he kneel to the queen when he was admitted to the Privy Council (see Martin Loughlin’s piece on p. 29)? On the day after he was elected, he spoke at a mental health trust fun day in his ...”

“... played in the establishment of BBC television’s reportorial and documentary conventions. Kenneth Allsop, Fyfe Robertson, James Cameron, Trevor Philpot, Robert Kee and Slim Hewitt (‘the scourge of Nuneaton’), all worked for it. The roles of writer, photographer and even picture editor often overlapped. ‘Memories of the late 1940s and 1950s are ...”

“... In a lovely 1963 piece on Miles Davis, Kenneth Tynan quoted Cocteau to illuminate the art of his ‘discreet, elliptical’ subject: Davis was one of those 20th-century artists who had found ‘a simple way of saying very complicated things’. Jump to 1966 and the meatier, beatier sound of a UK Top 20 hit, the Who’s ‘Substitute’, a vexed, stuttering anti-manifesto, with its self-accusatory boast: ‘The simple things you see are all complicated!’ You couldn’t find two more different musical cries: Davis’s liquid tone is hurt, steely, recessive, where Townshend’s is upfront, impatient, hectoring ...”

“... of City Lights bookstore, and publisher of City Lights editions, gave him a warm welcome; Kenneth Rexroth, older by twenty years than Ginsberg and the New York crew, was briefly a mentor. The poet Gregory Corso came out west and joined Ginsberg. Neal Cassady, the movement’s mascot/muse, whom Ginsberg and Kerouac had met in the 1940s in New York ...”

“... by Supreme Court jurisprudence that dates back to 1982, when the court ruled that a boycott of white-owned businesses in Mississippi led by the NAACP was a non-violent act that legitimately sought to bring about ‘political, social and economic change’. Many of the new laws against BDS are therefore clearly unconstitutional. The ACLU is currently suing ...”

“... The model for Life on Earth – thirteen hour-long episodes telling the story of evolution – was Kenneth Clark’s Civilisation (1969), which Attenborough had commissioned as controller of BBC2. Other programmes he brought to the channel included The Old Grey Whistle Test, Monty Python’s Flying Circus and (making the most of the new colour technology) the ...”

“... more to him than poetry. Fisher likes no jazz pianist more than Joe Sullivan, the rumbustious white Chicago artist who came up in the 1920s with Eddie Condon’s band. Like Fisher, Sullivan was an unabashed disciple of the Earl Hines style of playing, with that busily inventive left hand and the right hand playing octaves: The pianist Joe ...”

“... Transvaal to observe and report on the plight of black families who had been thrown off white farms. These evictions were prompted by the passage of the notorious Natives’ Land Act, the legislation which, like the Enclosure Acts, formed the bedrock on which the economic edifice of segregationist, and later apartheid, South Africa was ...”

“... whose food and service were superior even to the first-class dining-room, was not part of the White Star liner’s inclusive price. Passengers who took their meals there instead of the first-class saloon, paid at the time for what they ate, though they were entitled to apply for a rebate at the end of the voyage. After the sinking of the Titanic, several ...”

“... though it was the Rolling Stones who summoned Dionysus and Pan, with their none hipper retinue: Kenneth Anger, Christopher Gibbs, Gram Parsons, Jean-Luc Godard. The Beatles grew sheepdog hair and Bakunin beards, and adopted the statutory exotic guru, but they never really had anything like the Stones’ sullen, dandified grandeur. The Stones were ...”

“... standing as well as commercial success, was complicated. In 1922 Fitzgerald took himself off to White Bear Lake in Minnesota, near his home city of St Paul, and in June of that year, while correcting proofs for Tales of the Jazz Age, began work on ‘something new – something extraordinary and beautiful and simple + intricately patterned’. This work, a ...”

“... out has suggested a temperamental aversion to busy or obvious art. The visual silence of the white wall behind Woman with a Pearl Necklace, where originally there was a map, is an arresting compositional decision: the golden woman’s gaze, and the mirror’s reflection, meet invisibly in the great patch of pale light spreading from the window towards ...”

“... of the Oxford family of dictionaries behind its recommendations.’ There it is in black and white – the appeal to authority. Buy our product: no other is guaranteed genuine. The paradoxical (and some might say shameful) aspect of such appeals to authority is that they run flagrantly counter to the basic principles on which modern lexicography was ...”

“... are themselves adding’. Most of us would never have heard of Penelope Gilliatt and of the late Kenneth Tynan if they had not been weekly columnists. Both made a name as the Observer’s regular reviewers of (respectively) films and the theatre. It is true that Gilliatt was also a novelist, and that Tynan became the literary manager of the National ...”