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“... and formed Suede, Brett Anderson and Mat Osman were in a band called Geoff. In his memoir, Coal Black Mornings, Anderson describes the ‘small-town wannabes’ rehearsing in his ‘dank, north-facing bedroom’ before going out to play gigs in other people’s bedrooms:Sometimes Mat and I would write stuff at his house. Despite a patina of ...”

“... psychic traumas. In this reading Delany is following Brandt’s earlier critics, David Mellor and Ian Jeffrey, who identified in Brandt’s photographs coded expressions of his disturbed psyche. They contain what Delany identifies as ‘symbols and obsessions peculiar to himself’.Ever since Brandt became the focus of academic study in the mid-1970s, his ...”

“... matches being played with extraordinary speed and ferocity on the beach, most of the players black and beautiful, the supporters letting off bangers every time a goal was scored, and the bangers echoing against the apartment blocks and hotels. They played until it grew dark, and then another drama began. In her book Brazil, written with the editors of ...”

“... as one would expect from his 1970 admiration of Truffaut’s L’Enfant Sauvage, with its black and white photography and its old-fashioned use of the shrinking iris to close a scene by picking out a detail: ‘The serious way in which circle-outs centre one’s vision on a detail of the image is also a kind of affection towards its objects, in stark ...”

“... been traced with such keenness as here. Of the young Hetty Johnson, Ehrenpreis says: ‘She had black, black hair and the enchanting gift of docility.’ The word ‘docility’ has gone hideously downhill, and the word ‘teachable’ has never risen above the unfeeling. The biographer can but do his best with such ...”

“... of the idea the putrescent pigs have spread about you, that is, Lorca the bronzed gypsy, with black hair, childlike heart, etc.’ By the end of the year, however, Dalí and Buñuel were planning the script of Un Chien andalou, a Surrealist film of profoundly Spanish cut in its anti-lyrical violence and carnal ...”

“... British colonists and Anglican clergy pitted against sixty thousand enslaved rebels and some free black Dissenting missionaries. Observers in Britain feared that Jamaica might be the next Haiti. It took a brutal counterinsurgency led by Sir Willoughby Cotton – ‘a veteran of Wellington’s campaigns in Spain and Belgium’, as Taylor describes him – to ...”

“... material, at last, that Bayard is at home with, as well as a nod to Umberto Eco’s analysis of Ian Fleming’s narrative structures. True to his initials, Simon uses his training to perform a Sherlock Holmes-like cold reading on Bayard, who responds by requisitioning him in the name of police intelligence. So begins a mismatched-buddy policier that’s ...”

“... uncertain in James’s work, as she distances herself from Christie’s formalist model. The Black Tower (1975), yet another novel set in a medical institution (here, a care home for people with disabilities), is so preoccupied with the miseries of its doleful cast of characters that the unravelling of the mystery risks becoming perfunctory. The reader ...”

“... ample opportunity for combat at its most basic. At Tamai in March 1884, when Graham ordered the Black Watch to move forward, Captain Andrew Scott-Stevenson found himself in danger of being overcome by a throng of Dervishes until ‘my trusty claymore found its way to the hilt into several black devils. I clove a piece out ...”

“... the expulsion. Why did an overwhelming majority of current or former residents in Uganda, brown or black, feel this way?The answer, I learned, is that what happened in 1972 was the culmination of a process that had started a few years earlier, when many Ugandan Asians were disenfranchised both by British and Ugandan law. At that time, they had been a presence ...”

“... her affairs with George Barker, David Gascoyne, Eric Siepmann, Ronald Moody, Basil Nicholson, Ian Henderson ... And she could never write about the incident following her release from the asylum, when she was visited in her bedroom by a man with a mutilated leg, wearing her father’s dressing-gown. White lost her virginity that night, and conceived a ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... failed to sparkle. The vote at the end was won by the stern young Labour candidate, Will Scobie; Ian Driver, the Green, came second. Farage was last. That doesn’t mean he won’t be South Thanet’s next MP. He and his party are popular there. The latest poll by Lord Ashcroft gives Ukip the seat, with 33 per cent of the vote. It’s easy to see why Farage ...”

“... not Sex and the City … That’s four gay men sitting around talking.’ Meanwhile Issa Rae, the Black creator of HBO’s Insecure (2016-21), defended Dunham against allegations of ‘hipster racism’: ‘There could be more diversity, but I think that’s the fault of [HBO], rather than Lena’s.’It’s never easy to distinguish between drama that breaks ...”