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“... Bacon took her to a ‘bad street’, what she saw was a place ‘just crammed with people, mostly black people, walking on the sidewalks and sitting on the stoops and leaning out of the windows’. In the ‘good one’, by contrast, there was just a lone boy kicking a tyre into a gutter. ‘Ed, nobody’s here,’ she said to Bacon, according to Robert ...”

“... brewery and the wild gardens of adjacent streets. Joseph flogged the Gainsborough portrait of Sir Benjamin Truman, the brewmaster, asset-stripped the operation and bought up surrounding acres in canny anticipation of future development packages, the coming world of retro frocks, Moroccan internet cafés and ‘plastinated’ freakshow corpse art by Gunther ...”

“... formally Penman’s book is exceptionally polite, with its aphorisms, its extended quotes from Benjamin and Barthes, its skipping hippety-hop between memoir, analysis and slogan. That the style is rather familiar is perhaps a measure of Penman’s influence. It’s a style he dismisses at one point as ‘the cult of the little and the lost, the sliver and ...”

“... by him. Often, having the errors pointed out to him, he refused to sanction changes. This is a black mark against him? Not at all, says Ms Froula: the very fact that he refused revisions when these were offered shows that he repudiated for and in his poem any conception of human history as possessing a factual truth beyond the variously unreliable ...”

“... because they’re mainly used to freshen up a dim memory of something Winston Churchill (or was it Benjamin Franklin?) might have once said. But that practice is also a long-term consequence of the history of the word ‘quotation’ and its weaponisation in religious polemics of the 17th century.Works calling themselves ‘dictionaries’ of quotations began ...”

“... he adopted a new, liberal constitution and openly abjured his old projects of conquest. He seduced Benjamin Constant, his keenest and sharpest liberal critic, into becoming a collaborator. And on Saint Helena, enduring the petty humiliations inflicted by his British jailer, Sir Hudson Lowe, the vaguely comic turned intensely tragic; a man mocked as pathetic ...”

“... for a beautiful young woman to see to him as Jane Eyre looked after old Mr Rochester,’ Benjamin Taylor writes in his memoir, Here We Are. ‘What he got instead was me.’ Taylor was young, goyish and gay, all of which Roth was not. ‘I can’t be the first gay man to have been an older straight man’s mainstay,’ Taylor writes, but the ...”

“... boundaries came into existence, to reinforce the physical ones – the ‘White’ and ‘Black’ town – that were already there. The social and racial structure of the India Kipling was born in and later returned to as a journalist was determined by the Mutiny and, later, by the defeat of the Ilbert Bill, which would have given Indian magistrates ...”

“... no longer even figure in the top hundred. Andrew and Robert are barely hanging on. But Joshua, Benjamin, Samuel and Joseph have been restored to the places they held two hundred years ago, after languishing for years in the unfashionable regions of the charts. It is even possible to trace the rise of particular combinations of sounds. The popularity of ...”

“... in the full consciousness of the purity and lucidity of one’s motives (mine are worthy of Benjamin Franklin) one asks one’s self what one is doing in that galère.’ Michael Anesko’s strikingly authoritative ‘Friction with the Market’: Henry James and the Profession of Authorship gives a good many detailed and salutary answers in its ...”

“... He had told the story to his new heart doctor earlier that day, who said it was a myth even then. Black’s Medical Dictionary was now no longer the volume much consulted over breakfast that it had once been. He owned two editions – the 28th (1968) and the 40th (2002). In the first, a stroke is defined as ‘a popular name for apoplexy ...”

“... National Gallery’ and they chose not an Old Master but a huge painting by a living artist, Benjamin West (thereby ‘saving for the nation’ a painting by a North American artist that had in fact been commissioned for a North American institution). The most adventurous collectors of Old Masters in the first half of the 19th century, such as Lord ...”

“... helping to keep white liberal panellists occupied and furrowed until the ferocious later phase of Black Power made them all squirm.) Kazin had been unable to attend the symposium itself but, never one to miss a party, popped into the reception being thrown by Commentary’s editor-in-chief Norman Podhoretz and his wife, the writer and editor Midge Decter, one ...”

“... lose or reduce the extravagance but can’t quite fall for it either. An example would be Walter Benjamin’s wonderful remark about missed experiences in Proust: None of us has time to live the true dramas of the life that we are destined for. This is what ages us – this and nothing else. The wrinkles and creases on our faces are the registration of the ...”

“... between the cotton-pickin’ southern slave states and the northern Yankee country, in which a black man might be free.In form, and in content also, Mason & Dixon is, on a Which?-guide level, many things rolled into one. It’s an epic in ways both obvious and not-so-obvious like the Odyssey, and it’s a simple-hearted buddy story, too. It’s a burlesque ...”