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“... species which contain indican, the precursor of the dye, are steeped in a vat. Lime (or urine, or wood ash water – something to keep the contents alkaline) is added. Fermentation turns indican into indoxyl. Cloth can be dyed directly in the fermentation vat, in which case the indoxyl is oxidised to become indigo when the steeped cloth is exposed to the ...”

“... barely five pages into one of the great openings in the modern novel. Invisible Man is, as James Wood has recently written, a negative Bildungsroman in which the protagonist imitates and rejects one identity after another. In spite of Ellison’s non-fictional celebration of the American Negro past, Invisible Man is his declaration of independence from all ...”

“... too busy. He was an inspiring speaker with a simple and achievable message: avoid all tropical wood and palm oil products, choose local products over imports, and accept the higher prices. But he was too trusting and direct to make an effective lobbyist or negotiator: his meetings with bureaucrats yielded vague promises and much publicity, but few concrete ...”

“... it was a left hook which put him away after 93 seconds (two seconds more than it took to deal with Michael Spinks last year). The Guardian reporter said the critical punch sounded ‘like an axe going into wet wood’. On TV it looked less impressive. Besides, Mailer used that image to describe the death of Benny Paret in ...”

“... project of a senior officer, refused to put in overtime in the laboratories, preferring to chop wood. His inevitable transfer to a lower circle of the Gulag empire was almost welcomed as another stage in his education: the hard rocky bottom that felt firm to his feet. Like his peasant hero, Ivan Denisovich, he found a meaning in hard physical work, yet ...”

“... One family tree is very like another, and it doesn’t take many of them to stop you seeing the wood. Furthermore, when Kuper zooms in for a closer look, he selects areas already well investigated. If you’ve read David Newsome, Annan himself, Michael Holroyd and Hermione Lee on the Wilberforces, Leslie Stephen, Lytton ...”

“... Eavan Boland writes, ‘the attack of his syntax, his brat-pack stance as poète maudit.’ Michael Longley ‘felt overwhelmed and wanted to withdraw to a safe distance’. It was obvious that, as a young poet, he dominated the university scene. It was not so obvious that the university would dominate him. Of the Northern Irish poets who emerged in the ...”

“... from a Virginia plantation at about the age of ten and became the slave of the naval officer Michael Pascal – but his memories of growing up in a West African village are more suspect, as Taylor notes. It’s more likely he was born in America and knew Africa only at second hand. Both Equiano and Spavens fought in major actions in 1759, Britain’s ...”

“... perspectivist and occasional architect Raymond Myerscough Walker living in a vagabond caravan in a wood near Chichester, his archive stored in his car, a near sunken Rover. Such persons are much more than also-rans. They are the substance of a parallel history of Stamp’s creation that abjures inflated reputations, vapid self-promoters and the slimy gibberish ...”

“... unaided, Hickey first invokes the work of Chardin and Fragonard and then manages to bring in Michael Fried’s Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot, which he uses to explicate the meaning of the painting’s four looks; five if you include our own nostalgic look at what has now become ‘our gardenia’, a look which ...”

“... year’s list includes a teacher ‘who uses unlikely building materials, such as old tyres, scrap wood and bottles, to construct beautiful and ingenious homes in remote regions of Alabama’ and ‘a woman who, working from her wheelchair, is championing the rights and changing the lives of women with disabilities in the poorest regions of the world’. Over ...”

“... beauty and usefulness. Rhododendrons and azaleas blaze in the shelter of a carefully planted wood (broad-leaved and conifer) and in little plots inside the wood a range of herbs, vegetables and soft fruit is flourishing on finely-crafted lazy-beds. It’s as though the old civilisation of the nunnery is flowering again ...”

“... TV show Ready Steady Go!, and appeared in other films as well as Russell’s, including Alfie with Michael Caine. How much of her reputation came from her art and how much from herself is a question that haunts Kristal’s book as well as Pauline Boty: A Portrait, the catalogue for an exhibition of her work at Gazelli Art House earlier this year. Both have ...”

“... recollections of the happy times of Elgar and Vaughan Williams encouraged proposals that after Sir Michael Tippett, the next candidate for composer-laureate and international standard-bearer should be Tavener. As soon as a young or not-so-young composer in the post-Górecki era has been convincingly reified as an export article, the marketing managers can ...”

“... study can stand by Deryck Cooke’s magisterial I saw the world end (1979) and the long essay by Michael Tanner in the Faber Wagner Companion (1979). The other three recent books are built on shakier foundations. Ewans, the author of a fine study of Janáček’s operas, here traces the allegedly strong Aeschylean influence on Wagner, while Furness and ...”