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“... My little sister walks away from the crash, the black ice, the crushed passenger side, the eighteen-wheeler that destroyed the car, and from a ditch on the side of the highway a white plastic bag floating up out of the grass where the worms are working slow and blind beneath the ants that march in their single columns of grace like soldiers before they’re shipped out, before war makes them human again and scatters them across the fields and the sands, across stretchers and bodies, across the universe of smoke and ash, makes them crouch down in what’s left of a building while a tank moves up the street towards the river where it will stop, turn its engine off, the driver looking through a window smaller than an envelope, where he will sweat and think about how beautiful Kentucky is ...”

“... Mason, is particularly anxious, and his unscrupulous roust-about, Andy McKillop, who sees two black men visit Gemmy and talk with him, plays on these fears. There is a night raid. Gemmy is abducted, beaten, and only saved from drowning by Jock. He is removed to the care of a woman, Mrs Hutchence, the only one in the settlement who has a ‘real ...”

“... defence and science correspondent, Chapman Pincher. Out of the Express’s triumvirate of black-glass offices in London, Manchester and Glasgow came a torrent of newsprint that set the popular tone for the last days of imperial Britain, the ‘second Elizabethan age’ that was half-thrilled and half-terrified by Britain’s endeavours to build its ...”

“... the history of slavery, while the National Memorial for Peace and Justice commemorates the black victims of lynching in the American South between 1877 and 1950. For almost two decades the EJI and its executive director, Bryan Stevenson, have been fighting against the racial inequities of the American criminal justice system, and their legal trench ...”

“... Cambodian myth which recurs throughout the book locates the original crime much further back: the Black Lady. This woman apparently used her power of foresight to predict plots against the throne so that those whom she accused, even the King’s own relatives, could be executed the next day. The Black Lady makes several ...”

“... Amphitryon set in a parallel universe, introduces a line from Nietzsche.) As ‘Benjamin Black’, though, he’s shown himself willing to turn out workmanlike crime stories, and some of his best non-Black novels – among them The Book of Evidence (1989) and The Untouchable (1997) – add sinister plot elements to ...”

“... fully conceal. She observes ‘peacocks’ eyes of olive oil skimming atop the vinegar, dapples of black pepper and tawny streaks of mustard popped onto the biggest leaf of lettuce’. ‘Peacocks’ eyes’, ‘dapples’, ‘tawny’ – all signature notes of the mandarin sensibility of an Updike or Nabokov. Morvern’s voice has been praised for its ...”

“... by Alan Walker.* I was also reading – for amusement – the biography of Lytton Strachey by Michael Holroyd and one of Dorothy Parker by Marion Meade. In Holroyd’s book, I was most struck by some portraits – reproduced in full colour – that had been done of Strachey; there’s one by Simon Bussy, drawn in 1904 (the year of Isherwood’s ...”

“... blue, its spine adorned with the familiar gilt coat of arms; the Middleton is clad in unornamented black, suggesting a sly homage to the author’s early prose satire The Black Book, with its sardonic farewell to the reader: ‘Now sir, what is your censure now? You have read me, I am sure. Am I ...”

“... a narc, called Tom Coleman. When the operation had finished, 47 Tulians, almost all of them black, found themselves in jail. At the outset, the bust seemed almost flawless. Coleman, the son of a Texas Ranger and a one-time ‘officer of the year’, had posed as a construction worker down on his luck, infiltrated the underworld of Tulia, and caught ...”

“... was no room for half measures. Compromise with an idol was a denial of God. In The Idolatrous Eye, Michael O’Connell tackles a more difficult question: why did the Puritans believe not just religious but all forms of theatre to be idolatrous? It’s not difficult to see why they disapproved of the great cycles of religious drama. Although the cycles were ...”

“... her flat so she could watch Neil Jordan’s biopic about the nationalist politician and guerrilla Michael Collins. In the closing sequence, Collins’s fiancée, Kitty, buys her wedding dress, Michael is assassinated by anti-Treatyites in the wilds of County Cork, and Sinead O’Connor sings ‘She Moves through the ...”

“... been reissued as rather grand paperbacks, along with an eighth, a final hardback selection made by Michael Bloch. They all have titles like Ancestral Voices, Caves of Ice, Through Wood and Dale, Midway on the Waves and Prophesying Peace, and it will not escape the notice of the literate public that they are all derived, one with a bit of a spin on it, from ...”

“... Wife), 20th-century France (The Statement) and the Jesuit missions in 17th-century Quebec (Black Robe). Each of these places is evoked in prose possessed of that cutting edge of vividness which enabled Moore to write thrillers as well as mainstream fiction. In Black Robe his surgical directness can be ...”

“... comedies made at Ealing Studios in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Indeed, as Stubbs reminds us, Michael Balcon, the studio’s head in its heyday, was explicit in defining its mission. When Ealing was sold in 1955, he placed a plaque on the studio building that read: ‘Here during a quarter of a century many films were made projecting Britain and the ...”