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“... never mind that the cigarette was unlit – has been overlaid by a minimalist design of red and white text stamped on a wash of black, intimating No Logo chic. In the introductory chapter, in one of those famous footnotes, Amis remarks that ‘actually there’s a good reason, a structural reason, why novelists should excite corrosiveness in the ...”

“... Jeffrey Archer introduces a Labour MP who is likewise endangered by a young black girl ‘in a white leather mini skirt so short it might have been better described as a handkerchief’. But, unlike D.M. Thomas, both Raven and Archer are accomplished storytellers, keen on verisimilitude. Both are skilled in the use of stock characters, people who seem ...”

“... Masque of the Red Death’ I were just cleaning up streets our kid. Just cleaning up streets. Peter Sutcliffe to his brother Carl: Somebody’s Husband, Somebody’s Son by Gordon Burn Ower t’ills o Bingley Stormclouds clap an drain, Like opened blood-black blisters Leakin pus an pain. Ail teems down like stair-rods, An swells canals an becks, An ...”

“... who come to Africa in search of adventure. They trek out into unknown territory, assisted by a white hunter and a retinue of colourful, loyal Zulus. Their quest is for a lost kingdom, which will remain cut off from civilisation after the heroes have done their work and gone home (usually enriched with a few pocketfuls of ancient treasure). Formally, these ...”

“... As​ a young postgraduate in 1942, Peter Medawar was asked to look into the reason skin grafts given to injured airmen were quickly rejected by the body. His work introduced the concept of a biological ‘self’. He found that the patient’s immune system not only recognised the ‘non-self’ tissue of the graft but saw it as a hostile intruder and tried to destroy it ...”

“... The autobiographical fragment by Allon White entitled ‘Too close to the bone’, which was published in 1989 in the London Review of Books, has just been republished by the LRB, this time in book form.* Allon taught at the University of Sussex until he died in 1988 at the age of 37. He was the author of The Uses of Obscurity and (with Peter Stallybrass) The Politics and Poetics of Transgression ...”

“... going to happen at all, it was most likely during the futurist frenzy of the early 20th century. Peter Vergo, in The Music of Painting, examines a neglected aspect of the modernist era, when a variety of painters, poets, composers and inventors became preoccupied with the convergence of visual and aural stimuli – a utopian race towards a future of total ...”

“... a self-disciplined and abstemious diner with an enthusiasm, years ahead of his time, for light white wines and salad. (His headquarters in Utrecht now house a passable restaurant.) This influential tract, which remained in circulation as late as the mid-17th century owing to its perceived application to the doings of subsequent favourites (as Perry’s ...”

“... the UN headman in Kabul, a well-meaning, but not very bright Norwegian, fell out with his deputy, Peter Galbraith, who as the de facto representative of the US State Department had decreed that President Karzai’s election was rigged and went public about it. His superior continued to defend Hamid Karzai’s legitimacy. Astonishingly, the UN then fired ...”

“... visible throughout Elizabethan culture. Night is conventionally regarded as ugly; Juliet the white girl is beautiful; the point of the remark is the incongruity of seeing someone so radiant against this sunless background. We should infer that Romeo considers the random Ethiope innately repulsive, unworthy of the bright jewel in his or her ear.This may ...”

“... pushing buggies. I thought I recognised one of the buildings on the seafront from old black and white photos as the former French restaurant Lucullus, a favourite haunt of Philby’s, famous for its bouillabaisse. But I later learned that the restaurant had been demolished in the 1990s to make way for a Hilton hotel. The countries and organisations Philby ...”

“... and face are fitted into a geometry of curves dividing the image into discrete fields (brilliant white neck-cloths against sombre coats and smooth, hothouse flesh; a shawl, a fragment of a cushion, a fan; broadcloth punctuated by a fob) – all this ensures that a portrait by Ingres is an exotic object. That he painted this way by choice is proved by the ...”

“... of the newly-formed Australia Council. Behind established international figures such as Patrick White, Thomas Keneally and now Peter Carey crowds a small army – a second wave, as it were – of grant-garlanded and prize-bedecked novelists and storytellers, many of whom, especially those whose reputations derive ...”

“... of the profession, he has an innocent energy in the face of what he once called ‘the chipped white cups of Dover’ which has carried him through a remarkable career. Secretary of the Labour Party’s research department after 1945, a friend and adviser to Anthony Crosland at the Department of Education twenty years later, instigator of the Institute of ...”

“... We were​ an inseparable couple, my mother and I. Our address was: The White House, Hempton Green, nr Fakenham, Norfolk. Here we stove in the shells of our breakfast eggs with teaspoons to prevent witches from using them as boats (the eggs came from Mrs Atherton, who helped my mother in the house and kept chickens at her nearby cottage ...”