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“... one another in their childhood also insulated him against Eurocentrism: believing that ‘black, white and yellow people are fond of just the same kind of adventures,’ he introduced his readers to Chinese, Japanese and Arabic tales.Censorious colleagues at the Folklore Society said Lang had jumbled up genuinely ancient tales with the work of ...”

“... athletic shoe industry, and the fashion industry as a whole, traffics in images. A Nike as depicts Michael Jordan as a corporate CEO who takes time in between games to inspect the shoes bearing his name. The figures of athletes and supermodels flash everywhere. ‘Because beauty has something to say,’ is how Esquire announced its Christy Turlington cover, as ...”

“... There is also one Michael Agnolo from Caravaggio who is doing marvellous things in Rome ... He thinks little of the works of other masters ... All works of art he believes to be ‘Bagatelli’, child’s play, whoever by, and whatever of, unless they are made from life, and that there is no better course than to follow Nature ...”

“... the baker’s wife, Rosina Zoft, allows Katharina to use her bread oven from time to time; Michael Stahl, who owns a shed, lets her store her grain there; when she needs fresh milk, neighbours supply it. She, in turn, dispenses homemade herbal remedies, lends money and makes gifts of food and wine. Resentments arise when too little or too much is ...”

“... in this, and indeed any biography – its author. As Gordon Craig transformed theatre design, so Michael Holroyd in 1967 revolutionised the writing of biography with Lytton Strachey, which extended the biographer’s reach from the public to the private, from the work to the man, from the study to the bedroom. In doing so, he breached the border between the ...”

“... of his novel, leading us back from impending departure into the events of the previous year. Michael is an unprepossessing family man. He takes what he likes and abuses the rest, which is sometimes his wife. When her pregnancy entered its advanced stages, she became useless, no longer pleasurable, and he left her for the consolations of his ...”

“... The aim of SOE was to organise sabotage and revolt in occupied Europe, with the help of ‘black’ propaganda. Momentarily, perhaps, Dalton saw himself as another Lenin, lighting the touchpaper of an international socialist revolution. But again the results were disappointing. Instead of setting Europe ablaze, Dalton ended up fighting an epic ...”

“... when he says, in his closing sentences, that we ‘can’t say what it’s like to actually be a black-tailed rattlesnake, much less a little ridgenose’ (why that ‘much less’? How can he tell?) But, the personalities of different species – another remarkable feature of their diversity – are nicely displayed. When he describes coral snakes as ...”

“... We can dress as showily as birds (including crows – 70 to 90 per cent of clothes are dyed black) because we have found ways to stain pale yarns in strong colours. During the last 150 years the whole spectrum has come to be cheaply available, as it has become possible to synthesise dyes which previously had to be extracted from plants and animals. Dyes ...”

“... of a colonial plantation mansion he had built with his immensely wealthy wife, made overtures to black sleeping-car porters when he had had too much to drink. The Secretary of State, jealous of the special relationship between the President and his own subordinate, was himself secretly ill with an advanced case of tuberculosis that incapacitated him for ...”

“... He had brought along what I’d asked to see. And he pulled out a lined school jotter bound in black linen: there were the poems. They were all he had. They were thirty-odd in number. They filled the thin notebook with their beautiful, crisp handwriting, which ran smoothly and evenly, without anything unruly or fancy. It was rare for a single word to be ...”

“... to ‘discover’ extinction in the sense of gaining actual experience of the phenomenon. But, as Michael Neill points out, human beings do imagine dying and in the process they inevitably invent a notion of death capable of matching their presuppositions. To that extent, death could be said to be something that each society discovers for itself. As a ...”

“... your lover) and to be offering his publishers a valuable franchise along the lines of the late Michael Dibdin’s Aurelio Zen. From the start, it would have been a frail scheme to rely on. The book’s prologue, in which a Korean labourer, falsely accused of killing a young woman, is beheaded in front of Minami by a military policeman on the day of ...”

“... following sentence? ‘A fortune-teller once read my cards and said that if it wasn’t for a tiny black cloud hanging over me I could do great things and not only for my country but for all mankind.’ Instantly, a person opens before us like a quick wound: probably a man (that slight vibration of a swagger), grandiose in aspiration but glued to a petty ...”

“... is a regular visitor to the boxing gym on the upper floor, where the athletic young men – mostly black and Hispanic – spar in a raised ring, thrash oblong leather bags, pump metal, skip rope, and stalk their own images in three or four large mirrors, with a fury that must be reducing the life of the building still further. To stand at the centre of the gym ...”