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“... There’s an enviable clarity and forthrightness to Slimani’s writing, both in French and in Sam Taylor’s capable translation. A guy called Nicolas she meets in Madrid ‘had a hook nose and very nice hair. They had sex, stupidly. He kept pinching and biting her. She didn’t ask him to wear a condom. True, she was drunk, but she let him sodomise her ...”

“... Neel had two sons, one with the Puerto Rican singer José Negrón and another with the filmmaker Sam Brody. After Negrón left her, Neel remained in their apartment in Spanish Harlem, which doubled as a makeshift studio. Amid the fervour for Abstract Expressionism, she continued to paint people, including many of her Hispanic neighbours. The Spanish Family ...”

“... We were​ an inseparable couple, my mother and I. Our address was: The White House, Hempton Green, nr Fakenham, Norfolk. Here we stove in the shells of our breakfast eggs with teaspoons to prevent witches from using them as boats (the eggs came from Mrs Atherton, who helped my mother in the house and kept chickens at her nearby cottage ...”

“... but there’s a clue here to one that hasn’t gone away. French opinion is uncertain about white knights like Julian Assange, and still slow to pick up the language of rights, as spoken by WikiLeaks. In the world of governance, rights culture is one of the great climate-changers, melting away old assumptions about the exercise of power, just as the web ...”

“... Watts (later to become famous as ‘Dirty Den’), who looks down appalled at the blood on his white shirt. Cotton will turn out to be an arch-villain, one of the first killers living on the square. A phone call to Dr Legg from the hospital reveals that Reg wasn’t suffering from alcoholic neglect but from a major head injury: someone has assaulted him.It ...”

“... from Bogart. Hammett, it seems to me, invented Bogart; at least, the detective who made Hammett, Sam Spade of The Maltese Falcon (1929), is more like Bogart than even Bogart could manage to be. ‘Think again and think fast. I told that punk of yours that you’d have to talk to me before you got through. I’ll tell you now that you’ll do your talking ...”

“... visible throughout Elizabethan culture. Night is conventionally regarded as ugly; Juliet the white girl is beautiful; the point of the remark is the incongruity of seeing someone so radiant against this sunless background. We should infer that Romeo considers the random Ethiope innately repulsive, unworthy of the bright jewel in his or her ear.This may ...”

“... Sunny and Winston and the other five boys on the programme Graef writes about. Six of the boys are white and three are black; their ages vary from 17 to 20. Johnnie, the first of the boys to be interviewed, is a slim, sallow Irish lad who has no known father and an alcoholic mother. Chloe, his probation officer, reckons it’s ‘conceivable he just might be ...”

“... should probably try another film. Here Welles (Tom Burke) becomes a bullying shadow, and Houseman (Sam Troughton) a pompous pain in the neck. Neither of them shows any sign of wit or invention, so it seems obvious that everything good about Citizen Kane must have come from Mankiewicz, whose gags we are hearing the whole time. The present tense of the film’s ...”

“... J.D. Salinger, any aspiring genius who did not have a shot at it was not doing his duty by Uncle Sam. The truth is, of course, that the GAN had long been written – for what is Moby Dick if not the Great White Whale as put down on paper by the Great White Male? But it suited everyone to ...”

“... pedigree is mixed – all through the credits: the German Wenders as director, the American Sam Shepard as writer; the German Robby Müller as cinematographer, the American Ry Cooder as composer/performer of the music; the American actors Harry Dean Stanton and Dean Stockwell as the central Henderson brothers, the French Aurore Clément and the German ...”

“... it must have been written in 1939, before the horror of the death camps had occurred – in which Sam Pollit, the father, tells the children in his amiable, garrulous way that if he had ‘supreme power’ he might arrange the killing off of nine-tenths of mankind ‘in order to make room for the fit’. This would be done by gas attacks on people living ...”

“... and even themselves. First and most obviously, the great divide separates the rich from the poor, white from black, those with tolerable food, clothing and shelter from the underclass guests at the Tabernacle Soup Kitchen. Second, the mass choice of private security over public amenities, as recounted in Terkel’s interviews, atomises neighbourhoods and ...”

“... and I came across the local racecourse. She would put the dog on its lead and I would approach the white rails where the horses – with their mad eyes, soft telescopic nostrils, bulging veins and bony legs – were being restrained in front of the nooses stretched across the track by tense, hunched dwarfs in brilliant silks who abused each other with words I ...”

“... In Arthur Schlesinger’s court history, A Thousand Days: John F. Kennedy in the White House, which might without unfairness be called the founding breviary of the cult of JFK, there appears the following vignette. Schlesinger had been asked to carpenter a ‘White Paper’ justifying Washington’s destabilisation of Cuba, in which the high-flown rhetoric of the New Frontier might form a sort of scab over the fouler business of empire ...”