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“... We all have flickering memories of television programmes glimpsed or devoured on our parents’ black and white TVs. Two in particular have stayed with me for more than five decades. First of all there was The Singing Ringing Tree, which I must have seen on one of its first BBC broadcasts in the mid-1960s. Subsequent DVD releases have revealed that, in its ...”

“... There was a lot of racial tension around bebop. Black men were going with fine, rich white bitches. They were all over these niggers out in public and the niggers were clean as a motherfucker and talking all kind of hip shit. Trane liked to ask all these motherfucking questions back then about what he should or shouldn’t play ...”

“... and obvious delight at his own just accepted dare; Scotty Moore’s rattlesnake guitar; Bill Black’s rail-jumping bass. You can find the music itself a bit thin, jerky, underwhelming, and still see why it ignited all the brush fires up ahead. (In sonic terms, Moore and Phillips were probably far more influential than Elvis. Phillips’s use of echo on ...”

“... been poetic, Pandora’s were rhapsodic. They came tapering down out of the hem of that glorified Black Watch kilt like a pair of angels diving with their wings folded, did a few fancy reverse curves of small radius so as to recreate the concept of the human ankle in terms of heavenly celebration, and then ...’ There is quite a lot of this angelspeak ...”

“... when DiMaggio was the Yankee Clipper, modern fans were, consciously or not, pining for an era when black players were barred from major league baseball and the white players were underpaid peons in thrall to their owners. Cramer believes DiMaggio was famous in a new way, a new kind of ‘hero’: ‘the first guy we knew like that’. But ‘knowing’ was the ...”

“... avoiding bad language and the ‘sex, snobbery and sadism’ he denounced in practitioners like Ian Fleming. His characters were never clubland heroes. He cared as little for literary critics as he did for those publishers’ editors, on both sides of the Atlantic, who were anxious to improve his none-too-elegant style and even to tighten up his ...”

“... by calling homosexuality ‘an abomination’. The ‘lovely psychiatrist’ was not Selwyn Black, who also worked in her offices and eventually shopped her to the BBC, but a consultant from Belfast’s Mater Hospital, who took a career break shortly after her remarks were made. Selwyn Black has lectured in ...”

“... does, though, Self is susceptible to bouts of torment; it is Selina who haunts him ‘during the black hours, when I am weak and scared’. To prevent this happening, he keeps on giving her more money. For a new man, one of the new princes of our culture, John Self gets weak and scared quite often – and never more so than when he is in the USA, the ...”

“... was the result of an inundation of a huge freshwater lake which became, in a matter of weeks, the Black Sea. It is black because below the top few metres it is lifeless – lacking oxygen – and the sea floor is covered with fetid, dark mud where nothing but bacteria can thrive. Fish flourish only in the top water ...”

“... prepared to tolerate. As a result, the contest was converted from an election for somebody into a black-balling exercise against the front runners, Butler and Hailsham. Home certainly had by far the fewest enemies, and it was therefore possible, I suppose, to argue that he was the most popular choice. Perhaps the chief charge against Harold Macmillan is not ...”

“... much of a challenge to anything, or anyone – he was too like Ted Hughes, minus the Lawrentian, black-magical ingredients, and he was a shade too youthfully delighted with the plopping, slopping, thwacking sounds of spade on soil, or milk in pail, etc. (Donnish critics have always loved this onomatopoeic side of Heaney, though: maybe because it gives them ...”

“... the great god Horus, their powerful sense of containing the vast Nile waters in their loins, the black Nile silt within their bowels. In pharaoh-land, nobody objects to an eloquent self-advertiser. They know not the word ‘hyperbole’ – no more than doth N. Mailer. Several times, during the Nile-long course of Ancient Evenings, one gets the image not of ...”

“... though, seems to have rather thrived on his unpopularity: why else would he paint his church pews black, drive slowly in the middle of the road, tick off locals he caught ordering their groceries in English? Wintle’s biography is not short of spooky-vicar anecdotes, and we often get the feeling that for Thomas the only good church is an empty one. Thomas ...”

“... novels, she was asked if she knew the difference between right and wrong. ‘No. Nothing is ever black or white to me, at all.’ After which Dunn asks: ‘But do you have any kind of definite moral code? Like for instance you shouldn’t sleep with married men?’ ‘Not at all, no,’ Quin replies. ‘I feel that if you feel this complete recognition, then ...”

“... piece about dropping a stone down a mine-shaft:I peered a moment down the open shaftGloomy and black; I dropped a stone;A distant splash, a whispering, a laughThe icy hands of fear weighed heavy on the boneI turned and travelled quickly down the trackWhich grass will cover by and byDown the lonely volley; once I looked backAnd saw a waste of stones against ...”