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“... but there are also some reasonably honest witnesses. These include the stiff-backed statesman whom Max Beerbohm called ‘Britannia’s butler’, two twin widows on a Gospel quest, a get-rich-quick bride in Amazonia, a caustic spinster in India, a writer of fairy-tales, a future poet laureate teamed with a leading delineator of bosoms and bums, and a ...”

“... up in the gigantic rout as German resistance collapses. He is captured, and shipped across the Black Sea to begin years of forced labour in the Caucasus. Confusingly, the ‘Bolshevists’ don’t immediately kill or torture their prisoners. Although the captured soldiers are kept cold and hungry, the Soviet camp authorities regard them as misled but ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... we spent many hours in the crepuscular half-darkness of the studio on East 69th Street looking at black on grey pictures with Rothko ... through those long spells of looking, accompanied by long silences, our opinions were solicited with a deceptive humility. Newly evicted from the paintings, Rothko shared the spectator’s puzzlement: what are these ...”

“... like me).’ Beardsley, who died at 25, passed his brief life in the fin-de-siècle milieu of Max Beerbohm and Oscar Wilde. Like them, he was his own artefact. Immensely thin and hollow-eyed with long fingers and a large nose, he seemed to the actress Elizabeth Robins, who met him at a lunch party, to be merely the ‘uncertain ghost of Oscar’. Tate ...”

“... by those in the exhibition, invite attention rather than grab it. The 1903 full-length portrait of Max Beerbohm, his eyes cast down, offers no glance for the viewer to catch; the Breton Girl (1907) and Marie (1910) turn from you, even their profiles half lost; the face of Sybil Hart-Davis lying on a bed (she was, the catalogue tells us, an ‘acknowledged ...”

“... The title​ of Cedric Robinson’s Black Marxism is misleading. Shelving it under ‘Marxism’ never seems right for a book that questions the compatibility of Black radicalism and Marxist politics, as well as considering aspects of history, sociology and political theory. Robinson’s reluctance to be classified hasn’t always worked in his favour ...”

“... The naked man wrapped in his inadequate eiderdown. The teetering albino-blonde lady in cylindrical black, regular as a tramcar in her solipsistic excursions; remarkable in that she doesn’t have an accompanying pet, just the feeling that one is missing, that she pauses, drops a shoulder, sets her pace to accommodate this absence. There is something ...”

“... by the exercise of reason. The Harsh Voice and the much later The birds fall down, the monumental Black Lamb and Grey Falcon and The Meaning of Treason are essentially variations of the same battle. Blake, she believed, was on her side, so was Lawrence – though this disconcertingly meant claiming both of them as champions of the mind. ‘The mind must walk ...”

“... of bespectacled Teutons bumbling through Alsatian villages while freshly rinsed children with black bows and tricolour rosettes in their hair laugh at them behind their backs. But there is an older, more harrowing influence evident in Ungerer’s work. When he studied at the Lycée Bartholdi in Colmar, Ungerer used to shelter from the rain in the ...”

“... tradition may argue about whether non-racialism is merely ‘a form that the struggle takes’ (Max Sisulu) or its essential content and objective. Julie Frederikse, a former Harare-based American journalist, firmly declares it an ‘unbreakable thread’. However, the thread has not yet been tested to breaking-point. Although the relative harmony of ...”

“... Edward Evans-Pritchard (1902), Claude Lévi-Strauss (1908), Edmund Leach (1910), Louis Dumont and Max Gluckman (1911). They were formed in the age of Hitler and Stalin, and, in the cases of France and Britain, of impending imperial decline. The last generation came to adulthood during World War Two, and made their careers during the Cold War, the zenith of ...”

“... a girl swallowing a stork, a print too spiky and direct to be suggestive. The etching Baa, Baa, Black Sheep from 1989 was an early flirtation with a feral lover, and in 1990 she depicted Andromeda dismissing a tiny Perseus and reaching up to caress the sea monster instead; in both of these images the woman’s face is hidden. Loving Bewick is in some sense ...”

“... also about what did happen in this beautiful, brutally contested and colonised corner of Europe. Max Egremont, a graceful and practised writer, has taken pains to learn its complicated history; he has driven and tramped back and forth across the territory, now divided between three independent nation-states, and he has listened sympathetically to those who ...”

“... Among the new religious nationalists are the black-clad Union of Orthodox Banner-Bearers, who have burned Harry Potter books on the embankment by the Kremlin to protest against J.K. Rowling’s Satanism, and Dmitry Enteo, a wan-faced youth with a goatee, who has made speeches on TV about his plan to throw ...”