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“... to bring off a close imitation of Russian verse in English, but he is referring to Johnston’s Eugene Onegin and remains silent on the tetrameters of Johnston’s Bronze Horseman. Johnston’s new book, Choiseul and Talleyrand, includes two further Pushkin poems, ‘Count Nulin’ and ‘Mozart and Salieri’, both of which are also in Thomas’s ...”

“... Female Beauty’: ‘The ladies of Arabia stain their fingers and toes red, their eyebrows black and their lips blue … The Japanese women gild their teeth, and those of the Indies paint them red … Hindoo females, when they wish to appear particularly lovely, smear themselves with a mixture of saffron, turmeric and grease.’ There is a vast ...”

“... strikingly Sloan – abandoned types altogether. In a modest painting of fishermen on a dock, a black man turns to speak to a man sitting beside him. He is the only black in the line of shabbily clad figures, but the interest is less in ‘the Negro’ than in the tonalities of a city-bred companionship of strangers ...”

“... ignore British complicity in the making of apartheid South Africa). She begins with a story about Eugene Terre’Blanche, leader of the neo-Nazi Afrikaner Weerstandsbeweging (Afrikaner Resistance Movement), and ends with a request, in verse, to those ‘whom I have wronged’, to ‘please/ take me/with you.’ Krog wrote Country of My Skull in Afrikaans and ...”

“... rumours that she was passing in Harlem. The heroines of her novels are loners, alienated from both Black and white communities, but forced to masquerade as belonging to one or the other. In Quicksand (1928), Helga Crane, the daughter of a white working-class mother and a West Indian father, must pass as Black to enter Harlem ...”

“... but their power is the greater for that: coming at the end of a description of weather over Black Combe (a recurrent point de repère of the book), they are a formal act of conclusion and interpretation which refuses to interpret. Again and again this is the pattern: the creative energy of the poems is channelled into description, and the wisdom of the ...”

“... gaps, between urban workers and suburban professionals, between rich and poor, between white and black and Latino. By his willingness to change and to transcend the standard political categories, Tye’s Kennedy could have become America’s ‘high priest of reconciliation’. The seventh of the nine children of Joseph and Rose Kennedy, he grew up in an ...”

“... sort of like going to Central Park’.I thought of Joe when I read about Christian Cooper, the black birdwatcher who crossed paths with a white woman and her dog in Central Park on the morning of 25 May, the same day George Floyd was killed when a police officer in Minneapolis knelt on his neck for nine minutes. There are ‘white spaces’ in Central ...”

“... fortunes and died in a shipwreck. ‘All my childhood,’ she writes, ‘seemed to be under the black shadow of this mysterious father of whom no one would speak, and the terrible word divorce.’ Here was the taproot of her emancipation. ‘I would live to fight against marriage,’ she writes, ‘and for the right for every woman to have a child or ...”

“... perceptions of African American artistic expression. In a little over a decade, more books by black Americans appeared in print than had been published in the entire history of black American writing. In December 1923, Opportunity, the mouthpiece of the National Urban League, declared in its editorial: ‘There are new ...”

“... and ‘a general testiness’ prevails. Fortunately, even when his tongue is black and stuck to the roof of his mouth, a Frenchman’s palate never lets him down. Urine, cooled in small tins, turns out to be ‘a valuable source of ingestible liquid’, and the survivors on the raft divert ‘themselves with comparative ...”

“... Many enlisted. By the end of the Civil War 180,000 had served – about a fifth of the country’s black male population aged between 18 and 45. In the Revolutionary War of 1775-83, when the 13 American colonies sought to secede from Britain, most African Americans who took up arms did so on behalf of King George III (having been promised emancipation for ...”

“... of enslavement – and ends up being coerced by Brown.Contemporary commentators often said that black slaves were vengeful because of their barbarous origins. Sometimes they refined the point by saying that mulatto vindictiveness was worse because more devious and tenacious. The historical record does show that the reciprocal violence described by such ...”

“... with more medals than the scales of a fish’, wears boots with built-up heels like Eugene Terreblanche of the AWB. He meets up with his mysterious friend Walker who delights in new trades and scams: with the fall of the USSR Walker’s got a hoard of busts of Lenin and Stalin which he believes he can sell in South Africa – it’s the last ...”

“... written like this), until it started to serve him less well, and the long history of collapses, black-outs and hospitalisations began. His first hospitalisation was in 1936, and there were to be very many more before his death in 1962; he survived seizures of an intensity that might well have been expected to be fatal; he had a blackout that lasted for two ...”