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“... So John Wyclif’s claim in the 1370s that Oxford had once had 60,000 students but that after the Black Death the number had fallen to fewer than 3000 can be confidently dismissed. The estimate of 98,000 post-invasion excess deaths in Iraq, made by Les Roberts and his colleagues and published in the Lancet last November, has come in for similar ...”

“... with plays on Marols: Mohammed Ben Kalish Ezab, a comic Arab potentate introduced in Land of Black Gold, gets his name from ‘kalichesap’, liquorice water.) Conquering the Dutch-language market – as Tintin did in the 1940s under the name Kuifje, cognate with ‘quiff’ – was an important objective for him. It was the editor of the Dutch-language ...”

“... play of that name. Galileo wasn’t thinking of superheroes, of course, but Jonathan and Christopher Nolan, the writers of The Dark Knight, the new Batman movie, are certainly thinking along Galileo’s lines. What is Gotham City to do without a hero, since organised crime is always, it seems, far too much for the official institutions of law and ...”

“... element in that credo were the worst part of it. Here’s an editor, admittedly a Conrad Black editor but nonetheless a national editor, openly saying that nothing was wrong with the BCCI/Westland/Peter Wright/Guinness/Lloyds of London period that could not be corrected by attacks on trend-crazed clergymen. Populism isn’t gentlemanly ...”

“... great – bore of the year. Let me defer here to Adolph Reed, who is emerging as one of the few black American essayists worth reading in a period of intensifying racism and of stultifying parochial loyalties, and who never lets the pressure of the first move him an inch nearer to the second: Early in the saga, there was considerable evidence of ...”

“... of the damned in La Paz soon blossomed in a skein of imaginatively christened organisations: the Black Orchestra, the Fiancés of Death. Conditions could not have been better for a freelance crusade against progressive politicians and trade-unionists: i.e., in American parlance then and now, against ‘Communism’. One of the few benign consequences of the ...”

“... and its ways, seem simply to have been found, not made. And how simply. These are arts which Christopher Burns has yet to master. There are others, however, of which he already has an impressive command. Snakewrist, a first novel of unusual promise, is far too concerned with getting across a message to sustain over its full length the illusion of being ...”

“... paying his assistant staff) were somewhere between £10,000 and £12,000 – making him, as Christopher Tyerman calculates, ‘the equivalent of a modern millionaire’. In 1859 he might have expected to move on to the mastership of an Oxbridge college (the fellows of Trinity, Cambridge are said to have been already trembling at the uncomfortable ...”

“... themselves. But what if this dress code is subverted? What if, for example, rather than tie up her black scarf so that it clings to her forehead, the Iranian woman exchanges it for a Versace silk, which she then allows to ride halfway back on her head, revealing luscious inches of hair? What if the coat happens not to billow, but hangs slinkily? What if a ...”

“... jingling in an odor of salt and cardboard, mingling with jujyfruits, jingling with jujubes, in the black-crow licorice dark. In light, caught, the letters, transfixed, stiffen. Brighter than licked lollipops, livelier than soda in sunlight, lovelier than sunshine on cellophane the colors shine: popsicle orange and lemon-ice white, cotton-candy pink and ...”

“... In this short book, Christopher Hitchens sets down the main charges against Kissinger: murder, violation of human rights and complicity in mass atrocities on a scale equalled only by Eichmann, Heydrich and the like. As Hitchens admits, he isn’t the first: Joseph Heller in Good as Gold was as blunt about it all as it was possible to be ...”

“... is empty, the pilot dispersed, dissolved, beyond touch or thought. We tumble his bones into a black plastic bag to await the coroner. As it lies beside an open grave a wind will fill it like a black sail. An hour or so after going to bed I heard noises from the next room. It was Nick’s room and I knew the sounds were ...”

“... is always easier to obey if you dare not disobey. German women are to their lords like so many black beetles’: John Butler Yeats (father of the poet and of the painter Jack B. Yeats) was aware that people had a propensity to see others as beetles, but he thought it bad for them and for their art, and he deprecated the propensity when he found it in his ...”

“... in his attitude to the Jews’: but this did not stop him from taking a leaf out of Hitler’s black book. ‘His greatest mistake’: this rang a cracked bell for me. Less than twenty pages later, we bump into Ezra Pound at Mosley’s Black House, along with his pamphlet for the British Union of Fascists, ‘What is ...”

“... crosses embroidered on their uppers, put aside the red velvet papal cap and dressed himself in the black cassock and broad-brimmed hat of a country priest. Half an hour later, in a state of great agitation, he left the papal audience chamber in the Quirinale Palace by an internal stairway and tiptoed down to the courtyard, where a carriage was waiting for ...”