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“... lived on the far East Side amid entire blocks being cleared for public housing, also made gorgeous black and white slides, suggestive of imagined galaxies, which he projected on the exterior walls of condemned tenements for the pleasure of a few friendly artists and his Puerto Rican neighbours. At once melancholy and exhilarating, Inventing Downtown evokes a ...”

“... readers of the Sunday Telegraph. Time to think again. Time to look at the ‘theories’ of Benjamin Disraeli, and time, especially, to discover the deeply intellectualist conservatism of the third Marquis of Salisbury, whose record as the most electorally successful Conservative prime minister seems likely to be snatched by Mrs Thatcher. The ...”

“... materials. The book is composed of multiple accounts of the life of a young and affectless ‘Benjamin Marcus’ who both is and isn’t the same B.M. who wrote the book. ‘His father’ introduces the volume by asserting patriarchy (a.k.a. realism): ‘Not only are there inexactitudes of an appalling scale in this book, but events, comparisons and ...”

“... sometimes called her – took one look at the famous picture of Elizabeth Eckford, the lone Black girl on her way into school being yelled at by a line of hate-filled whites, and decided that the most important thing going on in it was what it said about negligent Black parents and ‘the equally absent ...”

“... him as an old schoolmate. He remained in Chile for several months – he would recall a time of ‘black humour, friendship and the danger of death’ – and then left his country for good. Back in Mexico, Bolaño founded with some friends what might be described as a punk-Surrealist poetry movement called infrarrealismo. The group’s manifesto, written by ...”

“... his involvement in an illicit printing operation in Dittisham on the River Dart, a so-called ‘black house’ run by a man called Piggott, whose secret business is forging currency. The Dittisham episode is the strongest in the novel and its visionary self-sufficiency suggests that it arose in Carey’s imagination separately from the rest of the book. I ...”

“... Karadžić. Dr Vladimir Dragan, a Montenegrin holy man with white hair, a white beard and a long black coat, descends on a small town in the west of Ireland and sets up as a healer, mystic, masseur and general supplier of spiritual goods. Like a latter-day Playboy of the Western World, he proves both vitalising and disruptive. Fidelma McBride, a young local ...”

“... with Hugh Stuart Boyd on prosody, with Richard Hengist Horne on contemporary literature, with Benjamin Robert Haydon on the artist’s vocation. Browning in this first letter told her that he loved her poetry with its ‘fresh strange music, the affluent language, the exquisite pathos and true new brave thought’. She saw this as another ...”

“... suitably British’ was the Prince of Wales’s description of the much-bally-hooed voyage of the Benjamin Bowring. In between the set-pieces of Pole-bashing eight sales exhibitions were staged in the world’s more congenial places and members of the expedition contracted 17 marriages, either to each other or to outsiders: all very different from those ...”

“... whites. These abolished slavery – they had no choice – but enacted a series of laws called the Black Codes to define the freedom African Americans now enjoyed. They had virtually no civil or political rights, and all adult black men were required to sign a labour contract with a white employer at the beginning of each ...”

“... still a long way off. In a shed at the bottom of the garden they would imitate her, shrieking: ‘Benjamin! Benjamin! Show yourself, ye wee devil!’ Benjy, the youngest, did not like this game. ‘Why d’you pick on me? Why always me?’ But they would goad him: ‘...”

“... babies and endangered species. This logo, as it would now be called, of the kneeling, shackled black was clear, compact, memorable, touching, and yet entirely decorous – with the added attraction, as Hugh Honour astutely points out in The Image of the Black, of hinting at conversion as well as ...”

“... Republicans gave him standing ovations with an abandon the US Congress had previously reserved for Benjamin Netanyahu; but this time, with the exception of one moment, Democrats stayed seated. With great fanfare, Trump introduced another of his special guests, the Venezuelan opposition leader Juan Guaidó. He pledged that Guaidó would soon be installed as the ...”

“... you first think of, the Great Wandering Albatross. It’s either the Sooty Albatross or the Black-Browed Albatross (both of which are much smaller and easier to hang round your neck if you feel guilty about having killed one). Butch Cassidy did not die in a gunfight in Bolivia in 1909, as portrayed in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid: in 1925 he ...”

“... revivals. To be sure, a few blemishes mar the renaissance: the periodic killing of unarmed black men by the police, for example, or the persistent failure of the public school system. Census statistics, moreover, reveal that nearly all the benefit of the 1990s boom has gone to the richest fifth of the population. Always a city of ‘Progress and ...”