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“... and depth. The standard line is that the group’s disruptive energy came from the prosperous white men who found that their privilege offered them no protection now that a stigmatising illness had emerged. Certainly that’s the way one ACT UP member, Ann Northrop, saw it: ‘Gay white men thought they had privilege in ...”

“... iron birds looked disapproval With rusty invidious beaks Among the water-lillies A splash – white foam in the dark! And you lay sobbing then Upon my trembling intuitive arm. He felt the disapproval of the iron birds to be an important clue to the couple’s ‘immoral’ behaviour, and he knew from his experience on the Force that ‘people who go into ...”

“... which thereby excluded the mass killings of Stalin and Pol Pot, has been criticised by many. Michael Mann chooses to call such massacres ‘classicide’ or ‘politicide’, and reserves ‘genocide’ for the destruction of ethnic or religious groups. Mark Levene, on the other hand, includes all of these within his definition of genocide as ‘the ...”

“... he never ceased to milk his memory for flagrantly sentimental recollections. For the 1964 Election Michael Foot wrote a Bevanite hagiography of Wilson, which he quickly expunged from his own Who’s Who entry (the opposite of the Kinnock technique) when Wilson’s Government, despite the presence in high office of Crossman and Barbara Castle, proved a ...”

“... likely extent of his readers’ acquirements. A great many people know that dentists commonly wear white jackets; a smaller but still substantial section of society has had the opportunity of observing that stewards on passenger aircraft are (or at one time were) similarly attired. Almost anybody of sufficient education to find the word ‘haemophilia’ even ...”

“... for his long-standing support of left-wing policies in relation to the EEC and to disarmament, Michael Foot owes his recent election as leader mainly to the fact that he is loved, admired and trusted as an unswerving democrat by colleagues from end to end of the Parliamentary Party; and he certainly sees his role as that of conciliator in the party’s ...”

“... Monsters and delusions of a more agreeable kind lurk in the stylish, elaborately skilful pages of Michael Dibdin’s A Rich Full Death. Ostensibly this is a detective story, a species of Holmesian charade penned by a paranoiac Dr Watson: yet even at this level it teases the reader with mysteries that go beyond the conventionally mysterious. The story is set ...”

“... headgear, he writes, ‘is black hat – black feather – all the best people are in black – white: some women, but not ladies exactly, are in bright colours.’ (What sort of creation do you suppose poor Emma was threatening to show up in?) An ugly, fat and foolish wife in the wrong hat: it isn’t matter for heroic suffering, but it is part of the ...”

“... Trump Village, Shore Haven, Beach Haven – for veterans returning to Brooklyn. According to Michael D’Antonio’s delightful new biography, one of Trump père’s schemes was to create an ‘independent company to buy used equipment’ – everything needed on a building site, excavators, tile machines – which he would then lease to his own projects ...”

“... did so expertly on existing myths of national identity and history. Not until now, however, with Michael Bartholomew’s biography, has much been known about Morton. Bartholomew’s book is an unexpectedly enlightening read. It turns out that the narrator of Morton’s travel books was an invention of their author, whose own life, personality, views and ...”

“... At the Grammy awards the other week, an unusual note was struck by Michael Greene, a record industry bigwig. The only real point of interest at most award ceremonies is the frocks (and sometimes, admittedly, the hair), so it was a break with tradition when Greene and his tuxedo launched into the subject of Internet piracy ...”

“... in the character of the pig-woman Ursula – in the words of Peter Stallybrass and Allon White in The Politics and Poetics of Transgression (1986), ‘belly, womb, gaping mouth, udder . . . the celebrant of the open orifice’. It is a commonplace among critics that, since ‘Bartholomew Fair’ is almost the same thing or place as the theatre ...”

“... the ratification of the Kyoto Protocol, made the ecoterrorist a pop cultural staple. The nadir was Michael Crichton’s novel State of Fear (2004), in which a group of eco-extremists fake climate disasters for political ends. Crichton appended various denialist tracts to the text, though its paranoid reading of climate politics was a few years ahead of the ...”

“... would later become a black ghetto, Podhoretz was the star pupil in the local high school, where white students felt threatened by gangs of teenaged blacks. In his 1963 essay ‘My Negro Problem – and Ours’, this early experience of feeling, as a white boy, that it is he, not the black kids, who belongs to the ...”

“... the Presidential jet together with her personal maid. To the 220 sets of china she ordered for the White House at $1000 a set, just when Reagan was cutting welfare. To the $46,000 wardrobe she wore for the Inauguration in 1980, accepted as a gift from couturiers who wanted the cachet of dressing her. Here is a guide to arriviste style and greed: and we are ...”