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“... and some of the older and more dependent labourers say they would not want it any other way. In black Africa and white Africa beer is used to buy submission or allegiance. It was not for nothing that the young Soweto rioters of 1976 attacked the government beer-halls: they felt their elders were being sapped of money and political anger. Anthropologists and ...”

“... curious hoax biography Nat Tate: An American Artist 1928-60. The book even included a small black and white photograph, captioned ‘Logan Mountstuart, 1959’, that showed a round-faced, faintly-smiling man with abbreviated eyebrows and incipient jowls. Boyd described him as a curious and forgotten figure in the annals of 20th-century literary ...”

“... by which time starvation was already widespread. The Mugabe Government, now wildly unpopular with black and white Zimbabweans alike, still fitfully attempts to dress itself in socialist garb, but the truth is drearily the same as everywhere else in Africa: at root, African nationalism has boiled down to a concerted grab for the country’s resources by a ...”

“... I staying. There is undoubtedly a gap in the market.  The Telegraph reports that I claimed for a black and white TV licence, the subject of much amusement among my colleagues. Today’s tabloids are particularly vicious. Not for them magnanimity in victory. ‘Arise Lord Gorbals’, the front page of the Mail sneers over a story focusing on the size of the ...”

“... and resemblances’) he may draw if he wishes on a language of atoms, anti-matter and black holes – but not, like Empson in ‘Doctrinal Point’, to cite individual physicists such as Heviside and Eddington. We may ask for ‘scientific precision’ in poetry but we don’t want displays of scientific knowledge any more than Johnson did: these ...”

“... takes its title from this Congressional medal. Once you start to look for him, he’s everywhere. Ian MacGregor, the man who helped Thatcher crush the miners, is ‘John Wayne with a Scottish brogue and a pinstripe suit’. ‘Now we don’t want to see no John Wayne performances out here,’ a sergeant tells his platoon in Vietnam. We see them ...”

“... here of other, quite different books: To Kill a Mockingbird; the Swallows and Amazons series; Ian Seraillier’s The Silver Sword, about an orphan in Warsaw during the Second World War; Claude Shannon’s Mathematical Theory of Communication. Shannon conducted research into the capacity of phone networks on behalf of the Bell Telephone Company in the late ...”

“... gently touched the rosary beads ... their lips whistled the faintest prayers; their garments were black.’ But Jack also recalled a figure of hate standing over the cot he lay in as a baby, and he reflects in the same letter: ‘I drove it out of my mind at once that it was Gerard risen like a ghost from his bed of miseries ... These are the beginnings of my ...”

“... his company’s image as non-racist, pro-African and hostile to the illegal Rhodesian regime of Ian Smith. He lit upon Duncan Sandys, a slow-witted, racist, pro-Rhodesian right-wing Tory MP, described by another director as ‘bent ever since he was a lower boy at Eton’. Sandys was interested in chairing Lonrho for one reason only: the remuneration. He ...”

“... written archives must by now fall open at the right places, marked perhaps by a spent match Peter Black inserted in 1971 or a shrivelled potato chip left behind by Asa Briggs. As for the one or two specific issues Scannell and Cardiff are able to enlarge upon, notably the treatment of unemployment and poverty, they have done so by venturing beyond the ...”

“... and that she was officiously being kept alive, although rumoured to be comatose, to have turned black and to have shrivelled to the size of a doll. The ancient Marchesa began shaking with laughter and continued until tears ran down her cheeks. She managed to pull herself together, but as Blackwood was leaving, started to laugh again as she tried to ...”

“... be shown to be more important than my life.’ Nora distinguishes the Woman Upstairs from the black man in a ‘Ralph Ellison basement full of light bulbs’ or ‘the madwomen in the attic’. The Woman Upstairs is ‘the quiet woman at the end of the third-floor hallway, whose trash is always tidy, who smiles brightly in the stairwell with a cheerful ...”

“... point, which Miller doesn’t make but seems just as important, is that there was no tradition of black abolitionism in France, nothing like the public-speaking circuits and abolitionist press that produced such figures as Frederick Douglass and Olaudah Equiano.) There is no equivalent of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Miller writes, ‘no singularly influential ...”

“... Wife), 20th-century France (The Statement) and the Jesuit missions in 17th-century Quebec (Black Robe). Each of these places is evoked in prose possessed of that cutting edge of vividness which enabled Moore to write thrillers as well as mainstream fiction. In Black Robe his surgical directness can be ...”

“... and went to Buckingham Palace to watch the Changing of the Guard, then went to look at the glossy black door of 10 Downing Street for the first time. For lunch, she ate what she fancied – salad, cheesecake and not one, not two, but three glasses of bitter lemon – and for once had not cooked any of it. Then she bought a plastic policeman’s hat and a ...”