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“... hero in his dealings with Hugh Gaitskell. But after Gaitskell’s death, a single speech on the white heat of the technological revolution transformed his reputation. As Prime Minister, from 1964, he enjoyed complete domination of the press for over three years. The Lobby in particular accepted him at his own evaluation, returning full of admiration from ...”

“... John had been deceived into thinking Clare was something else, an equally fictitious formula, ‘white’. They have no family because she feared children might show a touch of the tar brush. Before the fateful blow, John is asked casually by Irene Redfield, through whose eyes we see the action and who is also light enough to ‘pass’ when it suits her to ...”

“... benefit from a degree of misunderstanding: it keeps it from lapsing into imitation. By the time William Morris launched the Arts and Crafts movement in the 1860s, it took a certain wilful ignorance to believe, as he and Ruskin did, that the builders of the Gothic cathedrals were anonymous artisans, working humbly for the glory of God. Three generations of ...”

“... were serving in Croatian nationalist battalions in the Yugoslav wars, with underground American white power organisations promoting wider recruitment – and seeking out and funding East German neo-Nazis. More recently, some 15 American freelancers have joined gonzo-fascist Ukrainian units in the Donbass to fight ‘Putin’s communists’, though others ...”

“... turned ankle, rather than a fat, self-indulgent tyrant; Elizabeth not trusting anyone. In 1563 William Cecil drafted a decree demanding that she be content that some special cunning painter might be permitted by access to her Majesty to take the natural representation of her Majesty whereof she hath always been of her own will and disposition very ...”

“... In America, William Maxwell is something of a Grand Old Man. He has been president of the National Institute of Arts and Letters. He has won the American Book Award and the PEN/Malamud Award. For forty years, as a fiction editor on the New Yorker, he advised and goaded Nabokov, Eudora Welty, John Cheever and John Updike ...”

“... There are some known names: Cecil Beaton, Jasper Johns, James Jones, John Mortimer, Patricia Neal, William Styron, Andy Warhol. Among the rest are antique dealers, decorators, magazine editors, a ‘freelance music co-ordinator for fashion shows’, a princess ‘internationally concerned with matters of spiritual evolution’, an extraordinarily large ...”

“... the way black people talk (‘Foh shizza my drizzle’; ‘What in the damn shiz for a niz’). ‘White kids pretending to be black’, they prowl the streets looking for trouble, committing such appalling crimes as stealing hip-hop CDs, scoring dope and buying cigarettes with their fake ID cards. Part of the reason they are funny is that, for all their ...”

“... for a group of silicate minerals with a fibrous structure. Chrysotile, amosite and crocidolite – white, brown and blue asbestos – are the most common varieties. Its remarkable insulating and fire-resistant properties have been known for millennia, but asbestos only began to be used on an industrial scale in the last quarter of the 19th century. Large-scale ...”

“... The zest is illusory though. It’s more a matter of letting go. Frank Auerbach, ‘Head of William Feaver II 2008’ Early this year Auerbach relinquished the last of several versions of The Tree Opposite, paintings of the wall along one side of the alley outside his studio, the steps, a wicket gate, and hints of parked cars under ebullient ...”

“... preacher. Taking the National Geographic of June 1931 as his text, Howell announced that a white prince (the Duke of Gloucester, who represented George V at the coronation) had bowed before the Black king. ‘We of the black race are now free.’ Haile Selassie was, he said, the Black Messiah. Events unfolded from this point in a way that becomes ...”

“... anthropoid, beaten to delicacy; One depends for that, though hollow, upon industrialism, Upon milk white metal, upon furnaces all night. Having got the thing one may fill it when required, at leisure, From any river, from the common tap; Those cloud-pipes being frozen, with marine tears; And there will always be flowers to stick into it in the springtime. Lies ...”

“... a cashier in Cardiff. Failure to adjust to his new life, an obsession with time, and too much William Blake led to fantasies of omnipotence and to a physical assault on his old headmaster. This breakdown – and the vision of redemption that accompanied it – lies behind his later statement that ‘in my 23rd year I suddenly experienced a complete ...”

“... In the reign of Edward VI, an Exeter clergyman named William Herne, an enthusiast for the gospel, told one of the city’s aldermen that he would rather be torn apart by wild horses than ever again say the Catholic Mass. In December 1553, Queen Mary newly enthroned, the alderman entered his parish church to find Herne at the altar, in his old vestments and all ready to go ...”

“... Frank Kermode belongs to no sect of literary criticism, and he has founded no school. Like William Empson, whom he praises as a ‘genius’ of criticism, Kermode has always been more interested in a poetic than in a theoretic approach to the study of literature. He thinks that literature itself – rather than theories about it – is our best guide to how to read critically, and he has devoted the better part of a long career to this conviction ...”