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“... ago the lavatory consisted of a sink, a hole in the floor, and an alcove whose wall was thick with black mould. When it was occupied, the patrons used the hall, which was, except for the sink and the hole, indistinguishable from the lavatory. This is one thing I remember about the pub; the other thing I remember is that the pub was called the Jesse ...”

“... artistic couple of any sexual stripe), as celebrated as the earlier musical duo Peter Pears and Benjamin Britten, though they rigorously resist all efforts by the gay community to assimilate them. When Farson asked them for details of their sex life, George became vehement: ‘That’s part of a different story. Not part of the G–G story!’ And Gilbert ...”

“... Ginsberg led the others in this ring-a-roses with the grandees. They met Duchamp, Man Ray and Benjamin Péret at a party (fifty years before the selfie, Ginsberg snogged Duchamp). They ran into Tristan Tzara. Ginsberg and Burroughs paid a visit to Céline in the suburbs. They were greeted by his ferocious dogs (Burroughs must have liked that). Céline ...”

“... action. As we test every category and point of comparison, it’s easy to forget, in the words of Benjamin Cardozo, that analogies, ‘starting as devices to liberate thought … end often by enslaving it’.Laurence Louër and Kim Ghattas follow different but not incompatible lines of exposition as they struggle to make sense of events in the ...”

“... the odd shape of her head, with its slightly protuberant brow and guileless expression. The rich black tones and blurring effects seem photographic, but stranger than straight photography, as if the principle of photomontage had been applied to drawing itself. Kitaj’s bookishness wasn’t only a matter of literary references, which recur in his work; he ...”

“... blocks, one poem per page. Stonecipher knows her Baudelaire and Brecht, her Bauhaus and Benjamin, her dioramas and dactyliothecae (I had to look it up too). A child of Seattle, she also knows her Starbucks: When we were in Berlin, we stopped and got coffee at Starbucks. When we were in London, we stopped to get coffee at Starbucks. When we were in ...”

“... was the cohesion of a unified settler state in the wake of the American Revolution. Far more than Black slavery, the Native question was central to the reordering of political loyalties on the eastern seaboard. From the vantage of the American colonials, the Indians were, as the historian Colin Calloway has put it, paraphrasing Thomas Jefferson, ‘the ...”

“... momentum. People clustered to watch this marvel, as they had once thronged to see the young Benjamin Franklin, a proselytiser for the virtues of swimming, paring his toenails as he lay on his back in mid-Thames. There seemed no limit to man’s ability to defy the natural laws. It was not essential to limit the number of wheels to two, but tricycles and ...”

“... from these literary crimes creates a whole other self – he becomes a book collector. Walter Benjamin wrote of the different ways to acquire books: one could write them oneself, one could borrow them, ‘with its attendant non-returning’, one could buy them from catalogues, auctions or bookshops. He doesn’t mention stealing as one of the options, or ...”

“... a graphic look compounded of stage flats and wizened textures picked out in brass-rubbing black, ceiling white, royal blue and pillarbox red. Here was a love of the notionally unspoilt, a harking back to George V Georgian and, ideally, to the Georgian of Georges IV, III and II, not to mention the Edwardian of Edward the Confessor. Steeped in the ...”

“... of the gallant South’, as Billie Holiday might have described it, was open to anyone who hated black people and Jews, from members of the Ku Klux Klan to neo-Nazis. Emboldened by having an ally in the highest office in the land, they came with Confederate flags, swastikas, medieval-looking wooden shields, torches and, of course, guns. They came to ...”

“... Many enlisted. By the end of the Civil War 180,000 had served – about a fifth of the country’s black male population aged between 18 and 45. In the Revolutionary War of 1775-83, when the 13 American colonies sought to secede from Britain, most African Americans who took up arms did so on behalf of King George III (having been promised emancipation for ...”

“... by yellow fever in 1796. Malarial mosquitoes swarmed every summer, as the British architect Benjamin Latrobe reported in horror in 1819: As soon as the sun sets, the muskitoes appear in clouds and fill every room in the house, as well as the open air. Their noise is so loud as to startle a stranger to its daily occurrence. It fills the air, and there ...”

“... Irish, whose communities have had the greatest experience of political disadvantage and unrest. Black poets here are less reluctant than white to give vent to their frustrations – they don’t recognise didacticism as a ‘problem’. Nor does Tom Paulin, who as a critic is much concerned with British and Irish politics, and as a poet mixes references to ...”

“... older brother, heir to the family property, including Stratford Hall, later earned the nickname ‘Black Horse’ for his transgressions: first, he seduced and impregnated his wife’s teenage sister (the baby died in suspicious circumstances); then he defrauded her family and fled to Paris. Robert was raised by his mother in a townhouse in Alexandria. His ...”