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“... in for a spot of incest and unmarried motherhood – in A Certain Justice we are even given a ‘black smudge of pubic hair’ – but they still feel more at home grousing about the lower orders or condemning as racist the charge that the Metropolitan Police Force is institutionally racist. One might define fiction as the kind of writing in which it is ...”

“... they can be so deeply buried in the mind that it is as if they have never existed: ‘Total black; hours lost, never to be retrieved.’ Rachel is a lost soul: ‘My better angels lost again, defeated by drink, by the person I am when I drink.’ ‘I lost and I drank and I drank and I lost.’ This despite the fact that, to the immense irritation of ...”

“... in exhaustive study of the primary sources, is now the standard work and must stand alongside Ian Kershaw’s Hitler, Ulrich Herbert’s Best and Robert Gerwarth’s Hitler’s Hangman: The Life of Heydrich as one of the landmark Nazi biographies. As the author of a celebrated study of the Holocaust, Longerich is better able than his predecessors to ...”

“... follows. The same experiment was replicated in the mammalian cells of Dolly the sheep by Ian Wilmut and his colleagues in 1997. Such reprogramming indicates that the cytoplasm, which is the protoplasm of a cell surrounding the nucleus and is, like DNA, inherited, is also the repository of important biological information. This information is widely ...”

“... together as a succession of details – not unlike the narrative of particulars that according to Ian Watt constitutes the ‘formal realism’ of the novel. Had Griffith already achieved a novelistic ‘formal realism’? Not exactly. As a storytelling medium, cinema lies somewhere between theatre and the novel, and Griffith remained pretty close to ...”

“... the colonel, who had suspected him all along for a ‘pink-eyed weakling’. Grann brings out the black comedy of these scenes, where amid harrowing tropical hardships Murray is scolded for having scoffed some communal caramels. Fawcett’s preferred sidekick was Henry Costin, a trusty batman figure who called him ‘chief’. A former corporal and gym ...”

“... are not people at all but cuttlefish in human form: you have only to touch them, and they emit a black cloud.’ The former Yugoslavia has indeed given Ugrešić a specific case which can be used to examine contrapuntally the world she has roamed for the last 20 years, with its migrant workers, refugees, tribalism, faith politics, identity politics, consumer ...”

“... A chapter of Backroom Boys tracks the process by which two Cambridge students, David Braben and Ian Bell, used elegant mathematical fixes to get round the limited memory available on home computers in the early 1980s while writing an epoch-making computer game, Elite: Whether the components are atoms or bits, ideas or steel girders, building something is a ...”

“... he started his affair with Lys (while still married to Jean and while Lys was still married to Ian)? Was Barbara Skelton having an affair with the Polish war artist Feliks Topolski when Peter Quennell came onto the scene, still married to his third wife, Glur, but making Topolski so jealous that the men resorted to fisticuffs over Barbara? What made ...”

“... field of literature like a meteorite out of a cloudless sky, our very own qibla, our inscrutable Black Stone. That the first surviving Western poetry, born within a generation or two of the alphabet, should also be so well-achieved is astonishing. There is nothing tentative about the opening books of the Iliad or the Odyssey, no indication that these are ...”

“... usually serial, preferably home grown. British true crime tends to be about British killers – Ian Brady (See No Evil), John Christie (Rillington Place), the Wests (Fred and Rose), Dennis Nilsen (Des), Jeremy Bamber (White House Farm), Harold Shipman (Doctor Death) – while American true crime favours American atrocities. I don’t see my preference for ...”

“... more dressing-gowns). Al Alvarez saw in her poems ‘a real talent of an edgy, bristling kind’; Ian Hamilton found ‘noise and vanity’.But before she gave it all up, and renounced poetry to live alone by the sea as a born-again Christian fundamentalist, there were also the novels. Six acid comedies of bad manners, at least as splenetic as the poems, if ...”

“... gives a fuck who killed Roger Ackroyd?’ Raymond, attempting in The Hidden Files to define the ‘black novel’ in which he specialised, glossed the Jamesian school as ‘pretentious escapist crap for the well-heeled middle-class market’. A conventional put-down by a man distancing himself, quite reasonably, from his disadvantaged background as an old ...”

“... the three minutes came to an end as the lights faded dramatically in the entire theatre to pitch black. Anne and I were crying so much we couldn’t find our way off the stage, so that when the lights came back up we were still there, arms outstretched, banging into the furniture, wailing like Russian women around a grave. So Rupert has no respect for the ...”

“... a turnip – there is an echo here of Wyndham Lewis’s appraisal of her ‘prose-song … a cold, black suet-pudding … Cut it at any point, it is the same thing … all fat, without nerve’ – but also a literary aristocrat, an ‘aesthetician’ of ‘Methuselah prodigiousness’, ‘dandyish in her handsome wools and velvety in her sentences’ because ...”