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“... as I did in the country of my skin, all the methods I used had to be acceptable to white observers.’Black Teacher was met with hostility when it first appeared. Gilroy was accused of boasting and of exaggerating the prejudice she had faced; for her part, she complained her account had been softened in the editing. In To Sir, with Love ...”

“... death in 1946, he painted almost eighty more. Angora Cat carries a strange psychological charge. A white cat with electric yellow eyes sits on an Art Deco sofa, beneath a small figurine of a lion. The curvature of the couch warps the perspective and the cat is much too big for its seat. Its fur is made up of hundreds of tiny strokes of paint; the ...”

“... for some while now to admit to being bored by the huge, flat, ‘pure’ abstracts on the white walls of the museums of modern art. And yet non-representational paintings on a fairly large scale seem still to be what art students are most encouraged to make. Critics now incline to applaud in them evidence of a strenously physical relationship with ...”

“... were as real to him as Joan of Arc’s voices, Blake’s angels or Elwood P. Dowd’s giant white rabbit, Harvey. Trollope’s obsession about his characters originates in the kind of trauma that classically deranges sensitive minds. His wretchedness as a schoolboy is famous from the extended descriptions of it in An Autobiography. He uses terms like ...”

“... a little too short makes close ones blurred. Short and long sight are the first disabilities which Patrick Trevor-Roper discusses in The World through Blunted Sight, his newly-revised exploration of the effect of eye-defects on personality, art and literature. He endorses T. Rice’s epitomes of short and long-sighted personalities which, made some sixty years ...”

“... by the success of Abstract Expressionism, signifying a decisive defection from engagé figuration. Patrick Marnham enjoys Rivera’s murals, and describes them well, but he ignores or trivialises the wider aesthetic and political issues. Incredibly, he never mentions the Mexican School of Painting, which owed so much to Rivera’s style. He is more comfortable ...”

“... ever seen. His hair was slick, combed up to a glistening ridge; the lips were thin, the cheeks white. It looked as if someone had gone round his ears with a pencil. My Granda Michael looked like Glasgow: a place that felt far away by then, that sounded old and big and always in the dark. Just over twenty miles away from our coastal New Town of wall-heaters ...”

“... government jobs. What with the anonymous cruising sites of Lafayette Park (right in front of the White House) and the company of tolerant female colleagues in the federal bureaucracy, homosexuals managed to turn Washington into a ‘very gay city’. Hoover grew up in DC when it was a racist backwater of the Old South, and despite his own ambiguous ...”

“... initialled Amergin. This ur-bard’s ‘Alphabet Calendar’ receives an ingenious reading in The White Goddess, Muldoon reminds us, where its Protean swagger (‘I am a stag: of seven tines/I am a flood: across a plain’) is shown to conceal an alphabet of druidic tree-lore. Amergin probably wouldn’t have recognised the Roman alphabet; Ogham would have ...”

“... characters; interrogating motives; pushing beyond his own facility at phrase-making (‘clouds white as cricketers’, the moon ‘like a button on a blazer’) to find plain words for what he has learned. As in any family history, the story at the heart of Blood-Dark Track is the writer’s own, the drama of his struggle to open a path from the present to ...”

“... and the bias of the liberal media. They are also personally courageous. In short, they’re an all-white, lower middle-class bunch of the kind you’d expect to see at the football or watching The X Factor, with the crucial difference that they are authorised to take away your liberty and can use physical force if you don’t agree to accompany them to the ...”

“... verb, and occupiers defied the restrictive policing that normally kept city centre areas clean for white-collar workers and tourists. Inside the space, people made decisions on a directly democratic basis, gathering in general assemblies where consensus was supposed to substitute for majority rule, and demands to existing authorities were explicitly ...”

“... used to criminalise young black men. In a study published in 2016, the criminologists Patrick Williams and Becky Clarke wrote that while only a fraction of ‘serious youth violence’ offences in London and Manchester were committed by black people (27 per cent and 6 per cent respectively), most of those on the gang matrices in both cities were ...”

“... when he was 18. It’s never been translated, but according to Simenon’s excellent biographer Patrick Marnham it’s a would-be humorous story about his home town, Liège, ‘partly set in a chemist’s shop which specialised in laxatives for pigeons’. Over the next few years, under a variety of pseudonyms, he wrote 150 or so pulp books, mainly of ...”

“... evictor (with some help from the tax-payer) of the tenant with too colourful a professional life; Patrick Nicholls, suspected drunk driver; Nicholas Ridley, too loquacious an advocate of anti-German feeling; and Mrs Edwina Currie (‘most of the egg production in this country is, sadly, now infected with salmonella’). Then there is the long line of ...”