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“... is, the thief would be a role, a figure in an elaborate social masque, an example of what Edmund White nicely calls ‘the theatricality of everyday life’. Much of what we are is performance, on or off stage. Genet enhances, stylizes this idea; insists on its ritual rather than its fictional aspects, so that social life begins to look not only like a play ...”

“... Soon after​ Michael Brown was shot in Ferguson, Missouri, a book called The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace was published, describing one New Jersey man’s dual existence as a top student at Yale and an incorrigible drug dealer.1 Peace was an alarmingly precocious black boy whose mother toiled in hospital kitchens to raise the money to send him to parochial schools, where he thrived ...”

“... suddenly let him down. But it hasn’t changed. He has remembered where he is in moral time. The white poplar, a famous local beauty Today an old hag. The lake A bowl of slops, don’t touch it! The fuchsias among the snapdragon cheap and showy. Why? Last night in a dream I saw fingers pointing at me As though at a leper. They were worn by work and They were ...”

“... bologna. The only water is from the sink above the open toilet. The men in my cell (I am the only white guy – the others are black and Latino) are in for having open alcohol containers on a subway (two), marijuana possession (two), a bar fight (one). Two are a little fuzzy about it. Every two hours or so, the public defenders come through, names are ...”

“... voice-over, moving pictures, stills, paintings, engravings, cartoons. We see the witch in Snow White and the corpses piled up at Auschwitz and Ravensbrück; plenty of Goya, Seurat, Manet; Kim Novak almost drowning in Vertigo, the old major dying in The Magnificent Ambersons; Ivan the Terrible and Stalin; Hitler in one frame immediately followed by James ...”

“... a glamorous Berlin studio portrait, her nudity is accentuated by the dangling necklace and white scarf that cover her trunk. Although these photographs all date from 1925, the year she became an international celebrity at the age of 19, they also chart the successive stages – blackface minstrelsy, African fantasy, cosmopolitan Modernism – that mark ...”

“... collapse of American belief in a utopian national destiny’ as Los Angeles shifts from a white to a non-white majority. ‘Magical dystopians’, on the other hand, fashion ‘alternative Los Angeleses with surreal topographies, genders and futures’. Where the Armageddonist imagines a final conflict, the magical ...”

“... they applied so liberally to their hair. Caribbean doctors, judges and lawyers were invariably white and England came to be associated with rectitude, the pulling-up of socks and standing to attention. In the Cadet Corps, on school Speech Days, whenever the National Anthem was played, Englishness compelled deference and a feeling that one was in the ...”

“... Caliban is an aesthetic object rather than a monster or an abused slave, and his mixed black and white make-up suggests ballet rather than the movies. And as almost always in modern versions of Shakespeare, whether on film or on stage, the comedians aren’t funny, they are just doing their best to represent what they (and their director) imagine other ...”

“... a messenger. The US minister to France, Robert Livingston, had no staff.When Trump moves into the White House on 20 January, he will take charge of around 2.8 million non-military federal employees working in hundreds of departments and agencies sprawled throughout the Beltway and beyond. Trump gets to appoint about 4000 people to orchestrate it all.One ...”

“... Time in the Sun and instantly announces several elements of a familiar legend. Even in black and white the image is full of warm shadows, and the uncropped version fills out the legend a little further. The desert boots are missing from the Hamilton cover and so is the landscape above the writer’s head: a hillside gracefully cluttered with dark pines and ...”

“... words​ , reminiscent of W.E.B. Du Bois’s ‘double consciousness’, come from Theodor Wonja Michael’s autobiography, Deutsch sein und Schwarz dazu: Erinnerungen eines Afro-Deutschen (2013), translated into English as Black German: An Afro-German Life in the 20th Century. Born in Berlin in 1925, Michael was the ...”

“... on what they affectionately call ‘Our Hill’. The President’s secretary, who lives at the White House (and has lived with the President since he was Governor of New York), thinks her boss will be moving into the cottage with her. The President’s wife, another cousin, stays in her own fieldstone cottage on the estate when she is there without her ...”

“... long ago as Catherine Andrassy, a member of the high Hungarian aristocracy. In 1909 she married Michael Karolyi, also a high aristocrat but with left-wing views. In 1919 the Habsburg dynasty was overthrown and Michael became the first President of the Hungarian Republic. Michael and ...”

“... and even themselves. First and most obviously, the great divide separates the rich from the poor, white from black, those with tolerable food, clothing and shelter from the underclass guests at the Tabernacle Soup Kitchen. Second, the mass choice of private security over public amenities, as recounted in Terkel’s interviews, atomises neighbourhoods and ...”