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“... sight, glimpsed from his office on the 22nd floor of the glass tower where he works, of ‘roving black blooms of four-dollar umbrellas’. (His metaphors, however, are just as often wilful and imprecise: ‘Clouds like rats ran across the sky.’) And, turning his gaze inwards, Hans regularly becomes expansively sententious on humanity at large: when the ...”

“... hell that came to mind. There was no burning heat, and with cascades of rain every few hours, and black clouds gathering beforehand that obscured the sun, it was not even warm. Instead it was wet, wet from above and wet below. Here and there the red-earth roadway had withstood the rains, but for the rest it was only a ribbon of watery mud that marked our ...”

“... In one of literary history’s great instances of the pot calling the kettle black, Henry James complained of ‘the absence of spontaneity, the excess of reflection’ in George Eliot’s work. To other readers, of course, the proportion that Eliot – or even late James – sets up between narrative spontaneity (or action and event), on the one hand, and reflection or disquisition, on the other, seems harmonious and attractive, and it’s certainly easy enough to think of novels suffering from the opposite problem of lots of action and little thought ...”

“... of violence. The first is represented by the instance of a young woman shot from a lorry by the Black and Tans in Galway, the particular casualty behind the sharp, grim lines that goNow days are dragon-ridden, the nightmareRides upon sleep: a drunken soldieryCan leave the mother, murdered at her door,To crawl in her own blood, and go scot-freeThe going ...”

“... certain aspects of it – against the opprobrium under which it usually falls. Drawing on Walter Benjamin, her mentor in such matters, she sketches out a distinction between two contrasting types of kitsch – the nostalgic, which is bad, and the melancholic, which is good. The nostalgic is characterised by a fantasy of keeping the past alive in our ...”

“... new American Ambassador to France in 1784, legend has it that the French minister asked if he was Benjamin Franklin’s replacement, and Jefferson replied that he was merely Franklin’s successor; no one could replace him. Whether or not the story is true, it conveys Franklin’s stature as the only serious rival to George Washington for the title of ...”

“... a defence of West Indian slavery as ‘inevitably necessary’ and an attempt to prove that all ‘black’ people were naturally inferior to the ‘white race’.*It is ironic, therefore, that Long is our main source about Francis Williams, who in his lifetime (he died in 1762) had been the most famous Black person in the ...”

“... level of incompetence, or worse, that clubs won’t tolerate off the field of play. There is one black manager in the Premiership and only five in England’s entire professional game. In the National Basketball Association, by contrast, 14 out of 30 head coaches are African-American. I wouldn’t make too much of this: this ratio is still way below the ...”

“... was the only mark of his caste that James could identify. But both the women wore expensive gear. Black Dracula jackets and toreador pants with black puttees or black Benjamin Franklin smalls with sheer black hose and ...”

“... It was perhaps ten feet wide in the spring, and in the late summer it was no more than a series of black mud holes at the bottom of a ravine, with a few cottonwoods and dwarf elms growing along its banks. I remember that my little brothers and I would do almost anything to get to this creek. Cather’s ‘mystical conception of the frontier’, as Granville ...”

“... Air). Bloch’s passion for aerial and low life excursions was one of his many bonds with Walter Benjamin, the outstanding critical mind among his younger German contemporaries and, like Klemperer, an early admirer of Geist der Utopie. It was surely thanks to Bloch and his essay on Offenbach’s Tales of Hoffmann – written for the 1930 Kroll Opera ...”

“... what is considered by Americans to be the most difficult and graceful of games. Yet unlike Ali, a black American of comparable charm and skill, Jordan has never made politics part of his appeal, and his popularity among both highbrows and ordinary joes is harder to explain. He is famous only for being almost perfect at what he does, and gracious in his ...”

“... of themselves in scurvy exemplars like Verlaine and Rimbaud: a yen for intoxicants, an awe before Black culture, a certain sexual fluidity, a fizzing sense of alienation. In an article from 1957 titled ‘The Commercialisation of the Image of Revolt’, Kenneth Rexroth compared the new bohemia unfavourably with the old: ‘There’s hardly … a fad taken up ...”

“... the abyss. Limitations on length must have inhibited Helga Geyer-Ryan. Her contribution on Walter Benjamin’s philosophy of history is characteristically intelligent and dense (she thinks in German, which, in this context, is altogether an advantage). But her sketch makes use neither of the polemic correspondence between ...”

“... that not every so-called ‘reimpression’ is an intentional forgery. The celebrated ‘penny black’ of 1864, for instance, was reprinted by the British Government, in a few specimens only, for the benefit of the collections of British princes. Those of you who remain stamp collectors later on will have many encounters with forgeries and will soon know ...”