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“... seen from a marginal comment scrawled by a racist reader in a copy of the first (1966) edition of Patrick Leigh Fermor’s Roumeli: Travels in Northern Greece held by the Cambridge University Library. Where Leigh Fermor refers to the modern Greek language as being the ‘undisputed heir of ancient Greek’, the anonymous scribbler has added: ‘Nonsense. It ...”

“... kingdom described in great detail by Plato in the Timaeus and Critias. But the reality was Patrick Duffy with webbed hands and fluorescent green contact lenses, painfully painted on. Sole survivor of Atlantis, he used his special powers, notably the ability to survive high atmospheric pressure, to foil the evil plans of an evil-looking villain with an ...”

“... prove his point, Sperry and Miner took a patch of skin from tadpoles and replaced it so that the white belly skin grew up on the back. When these tadpoles metamorphosed to frogs, Sperry touched the skin on the back which months before had been on the belly, and the frogs scratched their bellies. Sperry and his collaborators extended these experiments to show ...”

“... it looks like an advertisement for holidays in Switzerland. The outside walls are painted white and red and guarded by a couple of PKK soldiers. Inside the gates are ornamental ponds and flowerbeds overlooked by a 30-foot-high white column on top of which is a miniature yellow star, the symbol of the PKK. The ...”

“... to protect whichever official I am travelling with. We began the journey from Arbil in a convoy of white pick-up trucks, escorting Khasro Goran, the deputy governor of Mosul, to his office in the old Baathist headquarters on the left bank of the Tigris. Each truck had a heavy machinegun in the back manned by alert-looking soldiers, some with black ...”

“... on the newest arrivals. Occasional television films from the Sixties show the indigenous white population leaving for Essex with relief, but the more profuse coverage of the last few years tells the different story of rundown Huguenot buildings being lovingly restored and re-established as private homes. Established in 1977, the Spitalfields Historic ...”

“... novel ostensibly addresses itself is no longer literature but painting. Alexander Wedderburn, the white hope of the new Verse Drama movement, is now writing a play about Van Gogh, The Yellow Chair. Van Gogh’s life, letters, theories and paintings provide the narrative’s principal leitmotifs, while his Still-Life with Books is illustrated on the ...”

“... Masturbator. Dali showed us a postcard of one of the colonies in Africa. Natives in front of a big white tent, leaning, sitting, lying, etc. It was a horizontal photo. When he turned it vertically what we saw was the large head of a woman – the tent was her chin, the figures her features. The double image. This is how Alfred and I got the idea of the double ...”

“... Covid. I hope so. Info panels for Osney Mead show the new inhabitants the university wants to see: white, young, thin, sporty and straight. The riverbank is to be blocked off by a glass barrier. The kinds of tree favoured by committees are planted at mathematically precise intervals. The buildings are sleek grey boxes laid out in a grid. Opposite the station ...”

“... on all approaches to poetry not in keeping with the realities of the day. In that year, 1941, Patrick Kavanagh was writing a 757-line poem on the charmlessness of Irish country life, which nevertheless manages to encompass a good deal of its pungency: The potato-gatherers like mechanised scarecrows move Along the side-fall of the hill ... Austin Clarke ...”

“... this were to be the last of the funhouse novels I doubt if anyone would complain very much. Edmund White, Garrison Keillor and Bobbie Ann Mason belong to the generation of American writers born during the Second World War. White’s Caracole is set in an imaginary country, part European and part Third World, in the midst of ...”

“... the likewise bedewed, glinting scalpel. Around the offending hand Eakins portrayed in black and white flecked with red the retracted thigh incision of a prostrate charity patient, the activities of five surgical assistants, and the recoiling mother of the abject, foreshortened figure. Some would say that such perspective foreshortening with some degree of ...”

“... on the pavement outside a curio shop. Across the street there was a body on the pavement under a white sheet: people kept flicking it back to see if the dead man was a friend or relative. Just past the shop, whose owner had been wounded in the leg, there was an area covered in drying blood, though the body had been removed. I saw a dent in the pavement about ...”

“... and a changing spectrum. When Sycorax sees, and when Ariel is later seduced by, the first of the white colonists, their sensuous reactions are fully spontaneous and uninhibited. In the 20th century, Miranda like the rest of Sir Kit’s descendants has a ‘touch of the tarbrush’, of which she is very conscious; moreover, she has the trained eye of a ...”

“... unlike now: Have a good butcher’s at these – there we for ever are in glamorous black-and- white, assertively staring out next to Germaine, Bardot, Twiggy and Lulu, Dusty and Yoko, Bassey, Babs, Sandy, Diana Dors. And London was safer then on account of us. Look at the letters we get – Dear Twins, them were the Good Old Days Duffy has always been ...”