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“... shop, along with a sign that reads ‘That’s All Folks’). It turns out, as the journalist Jerry Adler writes in the book, that ‘the objects with the best odds of survival were those small enough to have lodged safely in a crevice: keys, coins and rings’; along with golf balls, these things shall inherit the earth. In his introduction to Memory ...”

“... shell. A black liquid stained the dry red earth around it. Beside it was the carcass of a donkey, white bone showing beneath what little flesh remained. A few metres away a warthog lay rotting, and beyond that a camel. For miles outside the village – and outside every village I passed through in Somaliland, the self-proclaimed but unrecognised state that ...”

“... if one shifted too quickly from Assassin’s Creed to Eternal Forces (based on Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins’s Left Behind series of books), a game set in New York in which the Antichrist attempts to achieve world hegemony. The game has proved popular with a generation trained – one way or another – in the mental rigours of holy war, and the enemy is ...”

“... account is any mention of the warnings issued over the course of that summer by the CIA or the White House anti-terrorism co-ordinator, Richard Clarke, to the effect that Osama bin Laden was planning an attack inside the United States. Clarke’s name doesn’t appear in the index, or in any of the supplementary documents posted by Rumsfeld on his ...”

“... of Barack Obama, Oscar Grant, a 22-year-old unarmed black man, was shot in the back by a white transit officer in Oakland, California while lying face down on a train platform with his hands behind his back. He was taken to a nearby hospital, where he died seven hours later. Minutes before, Grant and several other men had been herded from a train by ...”

“... of pain worse even than losing a child. ‘She’s my best girlfriend,’ Elvis sobbed on the white steps of Graceland when she was gone: ‘She’s all we lived for.’ Before she met Elvis’s father, she was Gladys Love Smith. Her mother was Octavia Luvenia Mansell, her great-grandmother was a Cherokee, Morning ...”

“... competing on that circuit. The poor, mostly black inhabitants of the favelas didn’t mix with the white upper middle class living near the beach. Domestic servants, mostly favelados, would go to the beach only at weekends after sunset, when the whites had already gone home. What is a favela? The word refers to a plant native to the state of Bahia, in the ...”

“... a report that prostitutes were carrying on in the black-out by shining a torch in the pocket of a white raincoat. The woman author of a war diary, who had felt guilty because her town had escaped bombing, was at last able to report a near-hit: ‘Never in my life have I experienced such pure and flawless happiness.’ Alert observation, hard facts, subjective ...”

“... Thousands of American fingers flick their television remotes to Old Time Gospel Hour. The Reverend Jerry Falwell steps forward to address an adoring audience, worn Bibles in hand, blessed suppers of body and blood recently consumed. His message is a comforting one for this gathering. ‘They are scared to walk near one of their own kind right now. And what we ...”

“... in New York after losing themselves in the subway system. According to Zukofsky’s best friend, Jerry Reisman, Niedecker arrived in New York already in love with Zukofsky. Shortly after introducing herself, Niedecker began unpacking and, to Zukofsky’s distress, produced an iron and ironing-board. She had every intention of staying for a while. Zukofsky ...”

“... streets, the people the occupation brought out were an extraordinary mix, though overwhelmingly white: born-again Prairie Christians, anti-communist Eastern European immigrants, New Age anti-vaxxers (‘my body, my choice’), loudmouth hockey mums, free-thinking Mohawks, dreadlocked weed-smokers, curious small-towners and their snow-suited kids, all ...”

“... the story. A lad from Liverpool seized black rhythm and blues and transformed it. The sound that white America found too funky for its clean earlobes was re-synthesised by the Beatles and ricocheted out of Matthew Street and the Reeperbahn to recapture Teensville USA. J.W. Lennon, grammar-school dissident and art-school yobbo, used the idiom of rock and roll ...”

“... movie – I don’t see too many movies but I try to see them on weekends when I am at the Western White House or in Florida – and the movie I selected, or, as a matter of fact, my daughter Tricia selected it, was Chisum with John Wayne. It was a Western. FDR was known to admire Myrna Loy and Ike to enjoy watching shoot-’em-ups; underdog Harry Truman had ...”

“... than the defeat of the Democrats as the party of all Americans (with the exception of heterosexual white males and non-feminist white females), though that too it certainly was. At a slightly deeper level the election results reflect the breakdown of the Cold War structure of US domestic politics – exactly the same kind of ...”

“... szszszsz.’ Sometimes Billy zones out entirely and there’s a sprinkling of words on white space: ‘currj’, ‘double y’im dees’, ‘Sod’m’, ‘Eye-rack’, ‘Eaaaar-rock’, ‘soooh-preeeeme sacrifice’ – the concrete poetry of ‘freeman moxy’, as Steve Bell’s Bush used to call it. Billy gets cornered by these speakers, then ...”