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“... race, sex and the loss of political innocence of the novel’s young male narrator, offspring of a black father and white mother, take the work far beyond the category of topical satire. Anonymous has been strongly influenced by All the King’s Men (1946). His narrator, Henry Burton, the preppy, intellectual grandson of a ...”

“... they look like a wall ready for papering. Backgrounds overlaid with strong accents in brown and black or with patches of red, blue and green, bright as flags on a yacht. The whole articulated by hard pencil lines, some ruled, some making simple curves and circles. All of these things can be found both in Ben Nicholson’s landscapes and still lifes and in ...”

“... commuter who has channelled her mother’s Jamaican roots into consistent solidarity with the black culture and community of her adopted American homeland while simultaneously refusing to lose sight of the complexity of her own perspective as the daughter of a working-class white Englishman. In the essay ‘Speaking in Tongues’ from her first ...”

“... the lusting Breedt. There is a Shakespeare-spouting polyglot: the Thembu manservant April, whose black features wear a white mask contrived by Quinn and mutilated by Breedt. There is Breedt’s wife, fresh from a Boer War concentration camp and challenged by April’s rebellious son. And as each chases the other round and round, like figures in some ...”

“... Conrad Black is not the only tycoon to have dreamed of global domination while buying and selling newspapers, and he is not the only tycoon to have had people fawning over him on the way up and shunning him on the way down; he is not the only tycoon to have lived large, issued writs and faced criminal charges; but he is the only tycoon with a wholly distinctive prose style ...”

“... on German literature and writing radio plays, Gert Hofmann began to produce disconcerting novels. Michael Hofmann, his son, the poet, confronted him head-on in his collection, Acrimony, and in 1987 wrote in the LRB (25 June) about the second of the novels to be translated into English, Our Conquest. This covers the first two days of peace in a small town in ...”

“... only, or chiefly, because of who wrote it. The background is pure white, the lettering scarlet and black. Not the expected livery for a book subtitled ‘A Documentary’ (but, as it happens, exactly the jacket colours of a recent mass-paperback humorous compilation by a woman about men). That subtitle does make its way onto the jacket (insofar as authors ...”

“... Leone Company – a British philanthropic corporation founded in 1792 for the resettlement of black soldiers who had served as loyalists in the American War of Independence – used legitimate commerce to weaponise African consumption against the slave trade and slavery. This was the reason Benson was so concerned about his soaked tobacco: if local ...”

“... the second collection of poems by Cortney Lamar Charleston (Haymarket, £12), describes growing up Black in white suburbia. In ‘Hip-Hop Introspective’:Kids ask what FUBU means. White girls look at meconstantly. DMX never seems to be screaming.The underground heads north on my playlistswhile an old poster peels away from the wall.I’m beside myself almost ...”

“... cities nearer the coast. The city’s patron deity was Elagabal, whose immanent form was a conical black stone. His priests, of whom Julius Bassianus was chief, were still socially dominant in the region (they were perhaps, but by no means certainly, descended from the extinct royal dynasty). Bassianus had two daughters, Maesa and Domna. Severus, by then a ...”

“... and with fickle and disturbing acts of imaginative murder, usually (perhaps unsurprisingly in his black-and-while world) on policemen: ‘So lively, that policewoman regulating the traffic, putting her white gloved fingers to her lips and blowing kisses at a baby – and yet it wouldn’t surprise me in the least to see her stone dead the next minute.’ And ...”

“... the One Hundred Years of Solitude type (specifically, a variant of Ursula’s life), only with a black or malevolent feeling. The result is not satisfactory, and may have suggested to Garcia Marquez that the idiom of One Hundred Years of Solitude has, ethically or judgmentally, an affirmative tendency. He has returned to the problem more recently in The ...”

“... however, although admirable in themselves, lend to dilute and confuse what might have been a fine black comedy. ‘She was surprisingly strong for a dead woman,’ notes Victor, as he struggles to disengage himself from the clutches of his first victim. There are other contradictions in the book. The racy style of the narrative is at odds with Victor’s ...”

“... results. Those who harbour hope for a fair trial for Saddam need only look to America’s ‘legal black hole’ in Cuba to realise how unlikely a prospect that is. Kofi Annan has recently been pressing for a much more significant role for the UN in Iraq. Blue-helmeted troops could make a significant contribution to bringing peace to the country; they could at ...”

“... one would probably do better to read the infant Rilke. One might read Bernhard: Spring of black flowers, you are driven by an endless wind from the north, I will sleep, tomorrow the snow and solitude will already cover me after your shoes …But one might as well read Celan, or perhaps merely something histrionic translated from the Spanish. One might ...”