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“... I retreated to my thoughts.I felt sure that I had made Vikram Seth appear by thinking about him. Michael Holme, the narrator of An Equal Music, makes the love of his life appear by thinking about her. He’s sitting on a bus in Oxford Street when another bus draws alongside, and there she is: Julia McNicholl, or Julia Hansen as she now is, though ...”

“... this speech after reading the opening chapters of a novel by the protagonist of What a Carve Up!, Michael Owen (not the footballer). Michael, the author of Accidents Will Happen and The Loving Touch, is too experienced to be more than mildly affronted when a student finds his work insufficiently radical, but if his books ...”

“... First and most obviously, the great divide separates the rich from the poor, white from black, those with tolerable food, clothing and shelter from the underclass guests at the Tabernacle Soup Kitchen. Second, the mass choice of private security over public amenities, as recounted in Terkel’s interviews, atomises neighbourhoods and starves public ...”

“... blackface comedian Eddie Cantor (he contributed a Foreword to Cantor’s autobiography), of the black Hollywood star Stepin Fetchit, of the famous boy aviator, Charles Lindbergh. He admired the anti-union, anti-semitic Henry Ford, the prounion FDR, and, like many other Americans, as well as Winston Churchill, Benito Mussolini. Taken aback when the dictator ...”

“... Cotard sees the news of Harold Pinter’s death in the paper, Asian flu is spreading, the first black graduate of the University of Mississippi has just died. Cotard’s wife is about to leave him, taking their little girl with her. The play he is currently directing is Death of a Salesman, and his gimmick is to have young actors take the roles of older ...”

“... beginning a man scrapes the leaf of an exotic-looking flower and produces a small amount of blue-black dust. This is the sign of the presence in the earth of a certain grub. At the end of the film a leaf of the same plant is scraped and there is no dust. This is the sign that something is over, an adventure, an experiment, a sequence of crimes, all connected ...”

“... The first movie, shot by Woody Bredell, is a noir classic, full of haunting, half-seen frames in black and white, shadows disappearing into shadows; and there is a burial in the rain that looks like a photographic allusion to a famous Courbet painting, except that here the tableau is dominated by a row of umbrellas. When we first meet Ava Gardner (five years ...”

“... hearts or they weren’t watching. Written, directed and photographed by Cuarón, the film is in black and white, and opens with an image of what seems be a tiled wall. Credits are palely projected on it, but it’s hard to pay attention to them because the tiles are so interesting. It isn’t a wall, it turns out, it’s a floor, and the camera is looking ...”

“... limitations, but helpless against them. Even when reduced to the size of a postage stamp, or to black and white, there is no mistaking the pull and the skill and the force of his ...”

“... Michael Reynolds is the marrying kind of biographer: president of the Hemingway Society, he has published a 140-page annotated chronology of Hemingway’s life, a 2300-item inventory of Hemingway’s reading, and a monograph-length study of the creation of A Farewell to Arms, as well as three serial volumes of biography: The Young Hemingway (1986); Hemingway: The Paris Years (1989); and Hemingway: The American Homecoming (1992 ...”

“... his side: in this dense quilted blue of his, in his red and his shadowless green and the reddish black of his wine bottles. And the humbleness of all his objects: the apples are cooking apples and the wine bottles belong in the bulging pockets of an old coat.The two volumes of the New Poems are, in my view, among the most beautiful poetic sequences ever ...”

“... Goldcrest has produced All dogs go to heaven (a full-length cartoon) and Mike Hodges’s Black Rainbow, and makes money. The old (real) Goldcrest also made money, in the early days, but mainly it offered what it thought of as quality films, or, as the jargon of the trade would have it, ‘first-class product’. Quality films, but not art films. The ...”

“... all the rest of the features – and performed a ruthless are until it split apart into two coal-black ovals. It was through this dominating organ, that his heavy middle-European accent seemed to issue, and hardly at all from the little mouth, perched below its overhang, that only appeared to serve as a hub, for a cartwheel of wrinkles.’ The librarian ...”

“... the field was a white paradise of loneliness, and a starlit wind made the glass shake like loose, black water and the ice snore on the sill.’ ‘Raindrops, highlighted, were sliding in slant ocelli across the windowpane.’ The ocelli and the alliteration, like the snoring ice and the white paradise, surely belong in some faded poetry book. But even ...”

“... say and “flawlessly proportioned”,’ she wrote to Vita on 5 June 1918: Julian’s hair was black and silky. Eve found herself wondering what it would feel like to stroke, and promptly did so; she was amazed to feel a sensation akin to pain shoot up her fingers and lodge itself definitely in the region of her heart … she was determined to analyse ...”