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“... in his records of good things done, his observations of life in action, the hoof-prints of deer in black mud ‘shrunk by drought into crazy paving’ or the quivering of an aspen leaf which ‘makes a curved mark on its neighbour leaf’ – to say nothing of the self-critical honesty which has him worrying in case all this noting of particulars has been ...”

“... Amphitryon set in a parallel universe, introduces a line from Nietzsche.) As ‘Benjamin Black’, though, he’s shown himself willing to turn out workmanlike crime stories, and some of his best non-Black novels – among them The Book of Evidence (1989) and The Untouchable (1997) – add sinister plot elements to ...”

“... a cameo role as an air-force officer who questions the wisdom of the scheme. In the meantime, Ian Colvin, a journalist whose investigation into the wartime coup had prompted Montagu to come out first with his authorised version, published The Unknown Courier. So the tale has been told before, but Ben Macintyre has done a more thorough and readable job of ...”

“... Last month​ , Michael Gove dispatched Ian Paisley Junior, the Democratic Unionist Party MP for North Antrim, with brutal indifference. Brexit was done, the DUP had been done over, and everyone could see that it was entirely the party’s own fault. On 11 February, Gove spoke from the House of Commons while Paisley Junior sat at his computer in Ballymena ...”

“... at Sheremetevo Airport on the Monday morning it quickly filled with reporters: CNN’s Phil Black recalled anxiously phoning his bosses to ask whether he should stick with the flight even though there was no sign of his man. The plane was about to take off; journalists searched the loos; a new Twitter account, @SnowdensSeat or ‘17a’, tweeted: ‘I ...”

“... a set of steps to articulate the greenery (which, because his photographs, like Smith’s, are in black and white, is not green at all). While water and sculpture are picked up by painters and photographers, they are not needed urgently in a real garden. The experience of walking along a big herbaceous border, taking in the complicated plant relationships one ...”

“... on politics (the object of Michael’s affections complains that he’s ‘too dogmatic’, too ‘black and white’), while the tragi-farcical ending collapses the different levels of reality in a surprising and effective way. In The House of Sleep, on the other hand, a kinky, right-wing mad scientist rubs shoulders with more plausible cast members for no ...”

“... her was a quintet of elderly musicians performing dusty calypsos, their sockless feet in smart black shoes. For several years now, a number of Walcott’s friends, family and old students have travelled across the world to wish him well on his birthday, listen to him talk, and flit from one sort of jump-up or party to another. The official events were the ...”

“... retrieved from Brooklyn’s Gowanus Canal), and he wants to adapt this mode – its exemplar is Ian McEwan – to the American soil of the book’s themes or subject matter: multicultural brotherhood, immigrant self-fashioning in the New World, post-9/11 New York. This compact novel, in which an emotionally buttoned-down new arrival recounts the downfall of ...”

“... and you can see it running through our history – of conjuring up such transformations. Out of a black gulf of humiliation and despair, rises a sun of blazing glory. And then he moved from the grand statement to the homely detail – a trick of his – by turning to the small craft and pleasure steamers that had taken some of the troops from the beaches ...”

“... whose appeal to the sophisticated might be suspect. Was he trying to rewrite The Waste Land with a Black and Decker? Now, looking at Perduta Gente against a background of his earlier volumes, I find my original intuitions both complicated and reinforced. Those partial to the conspiracy theory of the sinking island of English letters may take comfort from the ...”

“... murderous dacoits and eye-gouging Tibetan monks. These expendable ruffians tend to be deep black or dark brown and misshapen with it. If an epicene hunchbacked dwarf with a giant head topped by a tarbush seems a touch outré, what about Ian Fleming’s Oddjob in Goldfinger – a cat-eating Korean with a cleft palate ...”

“... of sect to sect, patching up old schisms to make a whole and undivided church. (He even asked Ian Paisley to join in a wonderful stroke of naivety or taking the piss – I’ve never quite known which.) He held vast correspondences with priests, archbishops, cures and archimandrites – all of the smallest denominations. The American ones gave him ...”

“... also features his famous wooziness about names – he has been known to refer to Liam Brady as ‘Ian’, to Paul McGrath as ‘John’, and during the World Cup described Egypt’s best players as ‘the boy with the beard, the dark lad who played in midfield, the sweeper, the goalkeeper, the little dark lad who played in midfield and the very coloured ...”

“... not also appear in Nazi television programmes broadcast from the Paris transmitter, wearing the black uniform of the British Union of Fascists and speaking directly to a London audience, was simply an accident of history. If such programmes had been provided, there is no doubt that the British would have watched.Adrian Weale’s book prompts some very ...”