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“... We know​ what black comedy is but I wonder whether some stories don’t call for another colour. Pale grey, for example, might be about right for Anne Fontaine’s Gemma Bovery (2014), a stately, not obviously funny film in which an English woman stumbles into Flaubert’s plot and dies not deliberately by arsenic poisoning but accidentally by swallowing, or rather failing to swallow, a chunk of baguette ...”

“... Driver in Noah Baumbach’s Marriage Story, come from those other worlds. Johansson has played the Black Widow in six Marvel movies in the last five years; Driver has been Kylo Ren in Star Wars three times. How could they have got involved in such an exitless world, so stranded among a dearth of solutions?Are they dreaming? Won’t they wake up and plunge into ...”

“... imprisonment. Sibil got twelve, reduced in the end to three and a half. (Sibil and Robert are both black.) The sentences were handed down in 1999. For the next twenty years, Robert was in the Louisiana State Penitentiary, also known as Angola, and Sibil was at home with their six children. In 2013 she moved from Shreveport to New Orleans. At certain points in ...”

“... Presidential campaign in Philadelphia, Mississippi, where the civil rights workers James Chaney, Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman were murdered in 1964. The American Century details J. Edgar Hoover’s personal and the FBI’s institutional linking of white supremacist and anti-Communist hysterias, to which America’s national police devoted far more ...”

“... embittered talk and gestures tangle and finally flare into horrible violence: the death of a black man at the hands of the police, and the burning and looting of an Italian restaurant by young blacks, Malcolm X could have been a musical with death on its mind, or with death waiting for it, and some early intercutting of the Boston scenes with scenes of ...”

“... edge. Deep lustrous colours – oils, unmixed, swirly and thick – within a wide and solid matt-black wood frame. (Nolde made them himself: he had no use for the ornate plaster gilt of a backward-looking early 20th century.) Or waving, blowsy flowers, an infinity of oranges and reds. Or an agitated sea with an oblique crack of sunset or divine mercy in ...”

“... Soon after​ Michael Brown was shot in Ferguson, Missouri, a book called The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace was published, describing one New Jersey man’s dual existence as a top student at Yale and an incorrigible drug dealer.1 Peace was an alarmingly precocious black boy whose mother toiled in hospital kitchens to raise the money to send him to parochial schools, where he thrived ...”

“... One question in this strange, riveting story of identical black twins whose career of arson led them to indefinite confinement in Broadmoor is never quite addressed: what makes a person a person? How do we become individuals? These twins never made it into personhood, and their story helps one to realise that becoming a person is not the natural outcome of all childhoods, but an arduous self-invention which can go terribly wrong ...”

“... not hard to see why his readers might have assumed otherwise – that is, that the real speech of black Africans and West Indians, and of teenagers, was being copied. All three London novels seem to be extremely concerned to transmit various kinds of information. The Absolute Beginner is continually ‘explaining about’ such things as jazz clubs. Montgomery ...”

“... serves as an auction house. Josephine Baker for sale: what is the continuing enthusiasm for this black American expatriate Parisian exotic dancer, and is one entitled to share it?The three faces, the three bodies, of Josephine Baker appear together on the first page of photographs in The Josephine Baker Story. At the top, in blackface, she wears an ...”

“... War, is finally put down, although at no small cost to the superheroes. Scarlett Johansson (the Black Widow) took a journey through time and never came back, and the final battle (or life itself) was too much for Robert Downey Jr (Iron Man). The last scene but one is his funeral, and the last scene of all is a glimpse of an aged Chris Evans (Captain ...”

“... that instant of hesitation, they might have been lost. Yet I suspect that even when Russia’s Black Sea coast was receding astern in the spring of 1919, my grandmother and grandfather still kept the hope of return alive in some unreconciled region of their minds. My grandfather was heard to remark that it might be possible to join Kolchak’s White Army ...”

“... in a more aristocratic and accomplished manner, complete with emblematic fruit, by John Michael Wright’s c.1668 painting of James Cecil, fourth Earl of Salisbury and his sister Lady Catherine, now at Hatfield. Unhelpfully, there is no indication on the canvas as to the pear-bearing girl’s identity, and no date either. However, a modern brass ...”

“... pacing steps above; there are amazing blue night-time exteriors that contrast strongly with the black-and-white indoors. But we are also seeing a clunky old silent thriller, with terrible acting and gestures of sinister foreshadowing that make The Cabinet of Dr Caligari look like a model of cinematic understatement. This might be a matter of then and ...”

“... stories. The Fire Next Time consists of a brief, hortatory letter to a young nephew about being a black American, and an eloquent memoir/meditation on the same subject, which includes an account of Baldwin’s childhood and of a visit to Elijah Muhammad, leader of the Black Muslim Nation in America. The ...”