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“... of each character’s relationship to the deceased.Marsh explained in her autobiography, Black Beech and Honeydew, that she wrote so frequently about the theatre because it was what she knew best, but also because ‘it is [the actors’] business to give every reaction its due and then some. In that respect they can be said to be unusually ...”

“... to Kibroth-Hattaavah. Dr Rowlands did not explain exactly what Kibroth-Hattaavah was, nor does Ian Anstruther in his well-judged introduction to this reissue of Eric; he assumes that we all know our Fourth Book of Moses, which reveals it to be some sort of discreditable landfill for ‘the people that lusted’ (in fact, the Israelites who ended up in it ...”

“... self-representation. The one thing almost everyone knows about Turpin is that he rode his mare Black Bess from London to York in the course of a single night. This turns out to be a myth – there was no Black Bess, no ride from London to York – yet it has passed for fact since 1834 when Harrison Ainsworth published a ...”

“... Writing about Goya’s Black Paintings in Art After Modernism , a collection of essays published in 1984 by the New Museum in downtown New York, Kathy Acker wrote: ‘The only reaction against an unbearable society is equally unbearable nonsense.’ She once said she didn’t expect anyone to read any of her books all the way through from beginning to end: ‘even in Empire of the Senseless , which is the most narrative book, you could read pretty much anywhere ...”

“... Blackwood, 38 at the time and the mother of three daughters. Blackwood told Lowell’s biographer, Ian Hamilton, that after the party Lowell moved into her London house – ‘I mean instantly, that night.’On 27 April, three days before the party, Lowell had written to Hardwick: ‘I miss you both every minute. I may telephone for you to come and get ...”

“... the location shifts from London to a mine shaft somewhere in South Africa, where sweating Black miners in filthy hard hats are drilling into the rock. In a voiceover, the chairman says that 80 per cent of the world’s diamonds come from South Africa, most of them dug out of shafts of diamond-bearing clay at depths of three thousand feet. ‘The whole ...”

“... fully conceal. She observes ‘peacocks’ eyes of olive oil skimming atop the vinegar, dapples of black pepper and tawny streaks of mustard popped onto the biggest leaf of lettuce’. ‘Peacocks’ eyes’, ‘dapples’, ‘tawny’ – all signature notes of the mandarin sensibility of an Updike or Nabokov. Morvern’s voice has been praised for its ...”

“... yellow as well. And was that orange just then?) There had been no preliminary drawing done – in black – on those large sheets of white paper, no sketching. All this work, this whole process, I felt, was almost as much of a confrontation between the two of us as it was a collaboration. And so what, I wondered, must it feel like to be him doing ...”

“... for posterity the scene surrounding a band that ‘sounded like Airdrie … sounded like a black fucking hole’, since most of their peers ‘went off and became social workers and did courses on how to teach English as a foreign language or got a job in Greggs’ or ‘died or disappeared or went into seclusion, more like’. Airdrieonians grow up ...”

“... It is instructive to see such men sketched, as they are here, solely in their relation to Wilson. Ian Calder, for example, had been one of Wilson’s lovers. He was a brilliant and charming young man – not, perhaps, quite the Adonis, the nonpareil, he is here made out to be, but found fascinating by everybody. Miraculously free of ill-will, he was ...”

“... that these people must now eat for us?” So he fell back into talking about the 1970s war against Ian Smith. This meant nothing at all to young people and it addressed none of today’s problems.’ Second, in past elections Zanu-PF had distributed food and seeds to those with a Zanu-PF card: if you didn’t vote Zanu-PF you didn’t eat. ‘But now everyone ...”

“... in his records of good things done, his observations of life in action, the hoof-prints of deer in black mud ‘shrunk by drought into crazy paving’ or the quivering of an aspen leaf which ‘makes a curved mark on its neighbour leaf’ – to say nothing of the self-critical honesty which has him worrying in case all this noting of particulars has been ...”

“... Florian. It’s surprising they didn’t think to use ‘Vorsprung durch technik’ as a slogan before Audi did: ‘Advancement through Technology’ is Kraftwerk to a T.We never quite get a sense, from Uwe Schütte’s account of this cusp moment in Kraftwerk: Future Music from Germany, of how or why Hütter and Schneider took their new pan-European direction ...”

“... Amphitryon set in a parallel universe, introduces a line from Nietzsche.) As ‘Benjamin Black’, though, he’s shown himself willing to turn out workmanlike crime stories, and some of his best non-Black novels – among them The Book of Evidence (1989) and The Untouchable (1997) – add sinister plot elements to ...”

“... a cameo role as an air-force officer who questions the wisdom of the scheme. In the meantime, Ian Colvin, a journalist whose investigation into the wartime coup had prompted Montagu to come out first with his authorised version, published The Unknown Courier. So the tale has been told before, but Ben Macintyre has done a more thorough and readable job of ...”