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“... superyacht beneath him. A woman’s hair may be ‘a sort of aureate beige’ or ‘dyed a maximal black’. Pleasures are technical, liquid and faddish; they are afforded by ‘torrenting’, ‘blasting’, ‘hot-rocking’ or ‘up-skirting’. People hang out at Porkies (a restaurant), Jester (a club) or Dzoker (a pub). DVDs dubbed into the wrong minority ...”

“... to light on a good read for the plane, his eye is assaulted by a thwacking array of swastikas on black, gold and blood-red fields. Approaching them at random but with a certain circumspection, he finds, for example, Philippe van Rindt’s The Trial of Adolf Hitler, in which it is revealed that Hitler survived his attempts at suicide in the bunker; The Murder ...”

“... of breakdowns and benzedrine. Much as Powell and Pressburger re-created India in Pinewood for Black Narcissus, GWTW represents the triumph of artifice, the South of the 1860s concocted on a Hollywood lot. While the book was an ante-modernist throwback, a 1930s riposte to Harriet Beecher Stowe, the film lovingly embraces the possibilities of technology. It ...”

“... are invariably expressions of enthusiasm, celebrating the imaginative freedoms of urban life: for black and Asian writers, London is a place not of exile or alienation, but of ‘self-expansion’. Sandhu’s story gets going in the 18th century. There were blacks in London before then, but he wants to ‘show how they have depicted the city, rather than how ...”

“... is a singularly fitting profession, requiring cogitation first and foremost. On the other hand, as Michael White and John Gribbin intimate, Hawking seems to have been a listless student and a rather charmless young man before ALS struck, obviously intelligent but lacking any passion to use his intelligence in one direction rather than another. Thus arises the ...”

“... at the scale of structural and environmental racism exposed by the pandemic. This wasn’t news to black, indigenous and Hispanic Americans, who are subject to mass incarceration, have significantly lower incomes and higher unemployment rates than the white population, and for whom the healthcare system and the overwhelmingly segregated education system and ...”

“... animated by a single brain, they prepare the spell together. She glues on her G-string and the black lace bows (one carefully crooked) that cover her breasts. Between numbers, he officiates as dresser, the spotlights set so that only his arms are seen: she wants the audience to assume her dresser is a maid. The act is provocative yet chaste: the audience ...”

“... nearly every mention of knife crime in the rest of the national press was in connection with young Black people in London.According to Home Office data, almost half of all homicides in England and Wales are ‘drug-related’, but this is a very broad definition: recent analysis by Vice News found that it includes incidents in which those involved had been ...”

“... Lawrence’s 1941 Migration series have at last been assembled in their entirety. As a 23-year-old black painter in Harlem, Lawrence chronicled the experiences of black Southerners who fled the Jim Crow South for the cities of the North. The North was far from the promised land: the slums where blacks settled were ...”

“... on the complex miracle the devil has performed. A similar sort of miracle occurs in Bulgakov’s Black Snow, the (unfinished) novel he wrote about his experiences with the Moscow Art Theatre, a place he called ‘the graveyard of my plays’. A new work, initially accepted by the theatre, disappears into the crossfire of backstage politics and vanities, and ...”

“... The continuing American blindness to Vietnam itself, in this and many other instances, notably Michael Cimino’s film The Deer Hunter (1978), can be astonishing, but the myth also shows some genuine self-understanding. Apocalypse Now, in particular, is full of the sense that Americans exported whole chunks of their culture to Vietnam and discovered its ...”

“... in a small suitcase. He was neat but often wore the same clothes – a leather jacket or black and white tweed overcoat and dark corduroy trousers. His money he carried in cash, usually great wads of it. If he was robbed he didn’t much complain about it. The image changed very little after this. White quotes an American observer at the Democratic ...”

“... model of Fuller’s Dymaxion car, a paramecium-shaped tricycle with a Ford V8 engine. Beside it, a black and white video showed the Dymaxion car slinking past a row of box-like Depression-era Fords and sidling with UFO-like ease into a parking space its own exact size. Fuller intended to add what he called ‘jet stilts’ to the vehicle someday, so it could ...”

“... her son the appropriate medical help because ‘they did not want to get their hands dirty with a black man’s blood.’ The day after the murder, the Lawrences, acting on advice from the Anti-Racist Alliance, took the unusual step of appointing a lawyer, Imran Khan, as their representative – an act of some legal sophistication. Imran Khan was to have a ...”

“... a layer of enigmatic stardust over films I wouldn’t otherwise have been interested in, such as Michael Winner’s Lawman or the Danny La Rue vehicle Our Miss Fred – or, indeed, David Essex’s Stardust. These films were out of reach, but only just out of reach. Forbidden fruit hanging almost low enough to be plucked.I knew that I wanted to read Offbeat ...”