“... without ever raising the topic of race myself. Roberto’s case rested on his years dating a black woman and then living with a Muslim woman before at last marrying an Italian. He was a big fan of The Apprentice, and said he was voting for its former host because we need a president with ‘rough edges’. ‘We need a guy with big ones right here,’ he ...”

“... egos, abound and contrast. There is a character called Coetzee in each section, and a narrator, Eugene Dawn, in the first section who shares many of the author’s traits, notably a meticulous tidiness with his papers and the feeling that he’s only really happy among books; both qualities seem allied to the novel’s strategy of metafictional ...”

“... liked sitting in a tree reading Playboy in the mornings. And Lucy used Playgirl when masturbating. Eugene Linden regards this as “the most impressive proof of the complex intelligence of chimpanzees. So be it.’ It seems to me to argue equally well for the low intelligence of humans. ‘Like every product of the imagination, pornography is also art, albeit ...”

“... oppressed by a bad government that was not of their choosing. They believed, in the words of Eugene Lyons, an Amcomlib member, that ‘behind the Soviet façade there existed “another Russia”, which awaited an opportune moment to assert itself, weapons in hand if necessary, in the name of national freedom’ – and that ‘supporting it should be a ...”

“... at the Academy. There is also a photograph showing Menzel’s state funeral: the hearse drawn by black-plumed horses, the crowd on the steps of the Altes Museum and the soldiers in uniforms from the time of Frederick the Great. The Emperor Wilhelm II decreed all this for the painter he called the ‘Apelles of old Fritz’. The painter of modern life, which ...”

“... a Spartan slave – clutching at a sword plunged into his heart. The statue is fashioned out of black corset whalebones, and is fixed to a trolley – also of corset whalebones – whose wheels rest on two rails made of a coarse, red, gelatinous substance that turns out to be calves’ lights (the gastronomic delicacy made from the lungs of young ...”

“... wings – Snowflakes knock spots off Philibert de L’Orme Woodcut adoring kings with narrow eye Black-bottomed whitewear out of nowhere fast You see the azure through the muscatel The white opacities we hear as thunder The fact that each is an iambic pentameter disturbs their individual impact by turning them, in this listing, into a sort of joke stanza ...”

“... small doses might prevent them from returning to the religion of their baptism. In the same volume Eugene Tesson, a Jesuit, sanctioned physicians to administer pain relief only to the dying who had ‘made an act of submission to the Divine’ and those ‘in danger of falling into despair and blaspheming the goodness of God’. Such opinions are a reminder ...”

“... during the German occupation’ (Resistance party?), he became the lover of Christine, a young black woman who would end up a follower of Malcolm X. Monroe, it turned out, was the only white star who had ever interested Christine. In fact she identified with her: ‘She’s been hurt. She knows the score … I don’t read the gossip stuff. That’s what ...”

“... performed in it; and the minor hall beside it, which can stage chamber operas, is painted close to black inside and needs only a glitter ball to suggest a suburban disco. How come? The exterior of the building was designed by one architect, the Danish master Jørn Utzon; the inside by a confused committee, or, as the Australian critic Philip Drew sourly calls ...”

“... In fact he savages them. Fred, the oldest sibling, is unlikely to be bothered by being likened to Eugene Wrayburn, nor Franny and her husband by being greeted as the Veneerings, unless they’re avid readers of Our Mutual Friend on the sly, but Rose (‘Miss Piggy’), Hubby (‘Giant Haystacks’) and Jay himself (‘Plastic Man’) don’t need to work to ...”

“... South African material in the dramatic forms supplied by Tennessee Williams, Clifford Odets, Eugene O’Neill and Arthur Miller, Fugard found what he needed in Camus’s treatment of Algeria: ‘when I first encountered the articulation of that almost pagan, sensual life lived out in the sun, next to a sea, with warm rocks being, in a sense, the ultimate ...”

“... coloured in. A green line runs down the middle, from brow to nose and chin. The hair is blue-black, the side of the face to the left of the green line is pale yellow; that to the right, flesh pink. The background is viridian to the right, pink-mauve top left, orange bottom left. Yet this image, which apparently overturns an ‘accepted way of ...”

“... or thrown into shadow, with one point of high light in an area of gloom or foreground figures black against brightness, with the key shifting according to mood. These decisions were in keeping with Welles’s monumental analysis of the hero: the camera would delve like a shovel or coax as a sculptor chips a block of stone to find the lurking image. He ...”

“... and just a year after Lloyd George’s battle with the House of Lords over the People’s Budget. Eugene Debs, candidate of the Socialist Party of America, won almost a million votes in the presidential election of 1912. The seeming ascendance of the working class coloured the politics of the age and, in turn, determined an important element of the ...”