Search Results

“... the problems and sufferings of his characters must stand for the problems and sufferings of all black Americans over the past thirty years. The result is stylistic inflation. It is one thing for Hall to be terrified in Atlanta, quite another for him to be ‘terrified’ when he falls in love, terrified when he is happy, terrified even when opening a ...”

“... Sometimes he is stopped on the street by a stranger and plied with liquor: ‘“Hell, the poor black man – he’ll be frozen stiff!” He offered me akvavit, and the two of us drank it from the bottle on the street.’ He comes in for racial abuse just once, from a village headman, a Dane by the name of Dorf (‘village’). There are hard and impressive ...”

“... greed, and the shot opens on a vast room packed with a ready-made set of nasty-looking people in black, and even the oak-panelled walls seem to be hoping for a bequest. Wes Anderson has said he was thinking of the paintings of Caspar David Friedrich when he made the movie, and while some of the hotel scenes were shot in an old department store, many of them ...”

“... in love, and now believes that everyone deserves respect and rights, ‘no matter how crippled or black or female’ they are – a brilliant conservation of prejudice at the very moment of its apparent abolition. There’s an additional point here. The earlier proposed Wadiyan democracy that was meant to undo Aladeen’s rule was all about selling oil to ...”

“... the sink above the open toilet. The men in my cell (I am the only white guy – the others are black and Latino) are in for having open alcohol containers on a subway (two), marijuana possession (two), a bar fight (one). Two are a little fuzzy about it. Every two hours or so, the public defenders come through, names are called, and some of us are taken ...”

“... of the film, ‘The Mask’, is genuinely unforgettable. It’s set up by a voice speaking from a black screen in the person of Maupassant himself – the dead writer, not the narrator of any of his stories. He’s a little sceptical about what ‘the living’ make of life. Then the story starts. We are at a dance hall, a place that instantly reminds us how ...”

“... forget Lean’s earlier, quieter or darker films, which notably include Brief Encounter (1945), a black and grey masterpiece, and Oliver Twist (1948), an extraordinary conversion of Dickens into some sort of German Expressionist. Another recent book on Lean, by Gene Phillips, is called Beyond the Epic; and we might think ‘Before the Epic’ would also be a ...”

“... d’un retour au pays natal, a lyrical prose piece about the oppression and liberation of the black population of Martinique, as a title in Harrison’s poem ‘On Not Being Milton’; recently, I found myself returning to the poem and its Yorkshire worries (‘The stutter of the scold out of the branks/of condescension, class and counter-class’) as a ...”

“... crashed, don’t you know, into fabulous FloridasWhere flowers combine with the eyes of black panthersIn human skin! Rainbows stretched taut like reins’Neath the surface of oceans to greenish blue herds!I’ve seen fermenting great swamps, and fish trapsAmid bullrushes where a Leviathan rots!I’ve seen torrents of water fall into flat calm,And ...”

“... up our stories and in terms of feeling really bad about it afterwards. This new memoir from Michael Finkel streaks across a firmament already glittering with apologetic precedents. Stephen Glass, once a popular and ambitious young thing at the New Republic, invented email addresses and whole companies to hide his deceit, and later went on to invent a ...”

“... of New York in two decades running against the legacy of the three-term mayor, the billionaire Michael Bloomberg. Thomas Piketty’s unexpected blockbuster made talk of class conflict safe for polite company, while trend pieces heralded ‘the new socialist wunderkinds of America’ gathered around magazines like the New Inquiry (several of its editors ...”

“... the door like a stone statue, perfectly immobile. He aged visibly, his gold buttons grew dull, his black tailcoat acquired a greenish patina. Nothing more was heard of the fearless builder. The steam baths sent gay plumes of smoke into the sky every day. Unlike the hotel and the café, they were always busy. Our town​ was poor. Our people had no regular ...”

“... In this series Paul Theroux takes the London Transport Number 19 from his house down to the shops. Michael Frayn goes on a sight-seeing tour round Sheffield, and Michael Palin pays five quid to go to India on an old Leeds Corporation double-decker. And I, in a bus-ride down memory motorway, take the number 006 National Coach ...”

“... Country. He said that he’d bought the farm mainly because he wanted to build it up for his son, Michael, who worked alongside him. But a month ago he’d driven into Ixopo to get some provisions when the farm radio in his bakkie sounded an alarm ‘for Mr Arthur or Michael Mitchell’. Either Mitchell Sr or Mitchell Jr ...”

“... can see, from here to the snow on Kvannfjellet, the yarrow in the grass, a passing swan, eider and black-backed gull at the rim of the sound. I gloss uncertainties – this lime green weed that fetches up a yard above the tide; those seabirds in the channel, too far out to call for sure; these unspecific moths; a chequered wagtail, similar enough, though ...”