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“... As a child I collected butterflies, and I remember being impressed by a comic cartoon which showed another collector, older and more experienced than myself, who had accidentally swallowed a specimen he had been chasing. Later I felt the same sense of incongruity when I read Berkeley’s claim that everything he perceived was really in his mind. Surely he was overdoing it ...”

“... Joanne, taken in 1981, are Julius Hemphill, an avant-garde saxophonist and composer, and Joanne Robinson-Hill, a dancer and choreographer. They’re collaborating on a duet, probably in one of the Downtown loft spaces to which free jazz musicians migrated in the 1970s: at the very bottom of the image we can see the top of someone’s head. But Hemphill and ...”

“... to citizenship and self-determination on grounds of race alone. Vitalis calls this group the ‘Howard School’: the term captures both Howard University’s pre-eminence as a centre of African-American learning at a time when white universities would train but not hire black academics, and the distinctive contribution ...”

“... the American genius, writing to his mother in 1858 about the ambience of the then world champion, Howard Staunton, an editor of Shakespeare who refused to play Morphy. On hearing of the American’s rumoured madness, Staunton says: Well, well. One might have guessed it, but the cause Is none too clear. They remark these things in John Fuller’s excellently ...”

“... of To Have and Have Not (1944) and The Big Sleep (1946), two Warner Bros films directed by Howard Hawks, with writing credits for Jules Furthman, Leigh Brackett and William Faulkner. Hawks presided over them and made it clear that any allegiance to the novels by Ernest Hemingway and Raymond Chandler would be theoretical and polite, so long as the ...”

“... studied creative writing at the University of Iowa, under the tutelage of (among others) Marilynne Robinson. The novel he spent the next decade working on got nowhere until a friend mentioned it to the editorial director of a small press called Bellevue. Unlike the major publishing houses that had rejected it, Bellevue was undeterred by the book’s seeming ...”

“... taken at Mardi Gras in New Orleans in 1949), alongside Bix Beiderbecke, Bunk Johnson and Howard McGhee. The figures, haloed in yellow, float on a textured blue field with a jagged strip of canvas left bare at the top. It’s reminiscent of Clyfford Still, or one of Robert Motherwell’s blue paintings: the old Abstract Expressionist elite, New ...”

“... been available in print from the time of the great 18th-century landscape gardeners and on through Robinson and Jekyll right up to Christopher Lloyd and Beth Chatto. The highest achievement in gardening, even when plots are small, has always been seen as the creation of a picture. Gardens in which plants are grown for food, medicine or animal feed have their ...”

“... a New York-based Communist cell which included among its associates Mark Blitzstein, Earl Robinson and Aaron Copland. The Collective took its cue from the militant anthems of Bertolt Brecht and Hans Eisler, composing American versions of 12-tone protest songs: ‘The Strange Funeral at Braddock’ gives the full Modernist treatment to Mike Gold’s ...”

“... Guiana who could shave himself as well as roll and light cigarettes using only his mouth. Pete Robinson was a 65-pound ‘human skeleton’. Olga Roderick … was a traditional bearded lady, and Koo Koo (‘the bird girl from Mars’) appeared to be the victim of progeria, a rare disease that causes rapid and premature ageing.As Browning assembled his ...”

“... starlets to know that a really beautiful woman was rare indeed, in fact a ‘freak’. The actor Howard Duff described her as the ‘most beautiful thing he had ever seen’. To others, she was ‘an extraordinary creature’, ‘the Taj Mahal of beauty’. Or she ‘was like an animal, Ava. The sex thing.’ When ...”

“... and others. What to do with this equivalent, for the archaeology of sectarian nonconformity, of Howard Carter’s discovery of the tomb of Tutankhamun? There followed from the appropriation of the Muggletonian archive a practical exploration of a theoretical distinction that I had made, back in those same 1970s, between vertical and horizontal accounts of ...”

“... her, when one’s baby-sitter is a cabinet minister one realises one is really old!21 May 1997. Howard Davies is appointed chairman-designate of ‘SuperSIB’ (or, as it is later christened by Gordon Brown, the Financial Services Authority), as much to his surprise as everyone else’s. He had been on his way to South America in his capacity as deputy ...”

“... himself, ‘has an opportunist sense of timing ... he alone can tell you that Stalin considered Robinson Crusoe “the first Socialist novel”, and that Mao Tse-tung’s hand is “pink as if it had been boiled”, and that Trotsky’s “white skin and haunted eyes made him look like a Sumerian plaster idol”.’ Chatwin’s was a formidable and unlikely ...”

“... yoked successively to four demanding Scandinavians. Bunche was a brilliant young professor at Howard University, making his name as an Africanist, when Gunnar Myrdal hired him to work on his Carnegie-funded study of race in America. Myrdal soon learned that his new collaborator would work hours no one else would and proceeded to extract from him some ...”