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“... started out, as he did himself, in the North-East: but there was a wish to put him down, much as Glenn Hoddle was always being put down, before being driven off to France. I expect that the same outlook will see to it that the international career of Peter Beardsley, also from the North-East, will soon be reaching a premature end. It is possible to feel that ...”

“... fascistic and funereal, and in place of Pallas’ pediment is a neon by the American artist Glenn Ligon, faint in the bright sunshine, which reads ‘blues blood bruise’ – a quotation from Daniel Hamm, one of the Harlem Six. Each Biennale has a new artistic director; this time it’s Okwui Enwezor, Nigerian by birth (the first from Africa), now ...”

“... attend his funeral.‘What’s it like to be M. Ribotton?’ he wonders. ‘Perhaps that’s the most interesting thing in life, trying to figure out what it’s like to be someone else. That’s one of the reasons why people write books, another being to discover what it’s like to be yourself.’When he was working on The Adversary, Carrère wrote to ...”

“... to Darwen grammar school. In this volume, the narrative is entirely novelistic: dialogue for the most part. And robust, free-wheeling dialogue it is, plunging the reader convincingly into the rivalries and loyalties, the cunning and the chirpy valour, of adolescent boys. From time to time the sense of autobiography all but vanishes: the danger of selecting ...”

“... give way. It’s all so soothing, not to say benumbing. England is now and history is elsewhere. Most of the rough stuff isn’t here, it’s there. It’s there in Israel where General Sharon Even by Begin’s found intransigent. In Gdansk the water cannon are turned on As if cold spit could wash away cement. Now Arafat with all his options gone Concedes ...”

“... are the small change of war. But collectively they convey its reality far better than even the most well-informed journalistic accounts. Those two shootings were a thousand times repeated, though the reports were rare in admitting that the victims were civilians. More usually, the dead were automatically identified as ‘terrorists’ caught in the ...”

“... the élite minority arts of the 20th century, the US component is one of many, and by no means the most important. On the other hand, it penetrates, indeed dominates, the popular culture of the globe with the single exception of sport, which still echoes the British hegemony over the 19th-century era of bourgeoisie and the first Industrial Revolution, via ...”

“... and Haydn, and the aesthetic movement they represented. The Post-Classicists emerged for the most part during the period from the death of Beethoven (1827) to the death of Chopin (1849). A substantially expanded version of the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures given at Harvard during 1980-1, The Romantic Generation, which follows in the path of its ...”

“... inequality. Tunisia was a repressive police state in which information was tightly controlled and most people never dared to criticise the leadership out loud. Egypt was a military dictatorship that allowed a fair amount of freedom of expression, as long as it had no political consequences: you could criticise the president, but not launch a campaign to ...”

“... them to the balconies (deprecatingly called ‘buzzards’ roosts’) or along the walls. In most parts of the South, blacks were denied the basic prerogatives of citizenship, including the franchise and jury service. As the story is customarily told, the victory against Jim Crow began with the Supreme Court’s landmark 1954 ruling in Brown v. Board of ...”

“... slow bowlers never scared anyone. The so-called spinner whose approach to slow bowling Warne takes most pleasure in contrasting with his own is the English player Ashley Giles (or Ashley ‘Hit-Me-Miles’ as Warne calls him). Giles spun it a bit but not a lot. He took wickets at regular intervals with his slow left-arm spin, but never explosively and ...”

“... by ignoring the armed activities of republicans before the riots of August 1969. It is actually most subversive in showing working-class Protestants in a good light.The focus on the family owes much to the time of the film’s inception at the start of the Covid pandemic. ‘Some of the circumstances,’ Branagh said a few months ago, ‘reflected and ...”

“... is a central theme of The Ground Breaking, a riveting book by Scott Ellsworth, who has spent most of his adult life piecing together the story of perhaps the deadliest instance of racial violence in the country’s history. (I say perhaps because the exact number of victims remains unknown.)Ellsworth, who teaches at the University of Michigan, grew up in ...”

“... to prefer Cézanne to Augustus John. Forced into national service for 18 slack months, he spent most of the time reading, Joyce above all, and Ulysses became the subject of a first suite of etchings; old media attracted him as much as new. ‘Hamilton was fascinated by the skill, the virtuosity and the outrageous power of the command of language that gave ...”

“... Late in August I visited Documenta 11, the most recent version of the mega-exhibition that has been held in the German city of Kassel since 1955, when Arnold Bode, a professor of art at the Kassel Academy, decided to organise an international art show. It achieved such success that it soon became a crucial element of Kassel’s character as a city, once the arms industry had gone ...”