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“... major song and Etta one of the supreme live performers. Once, at a surreal outdoor concert at the Paul Masson Winery, marooned among pre-tech-stock-crash Silicon Valley yuppies dutifully sipping Chardonnay, I watched her do the plumpest, most lascivious cakewalk imaginable. But I could hardly live on her for the rest of the day. I started squawking like an ...”

“... under. When corporate scandals first hit the headlines early in 2002, the US Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill attributed them to the immorality of a ‘small number’ of miscreants. Apparently he’d been misinformed. The rapacious practices of these executives and firms – whether or not technically illegal – are typical of, and endemic to, corporate ...”

“... about the nature of money, we need to travel to the Pacific Ocean. In Micronesia, about 1800 miles north of the eastern corner of Australia, there’s a group of islands called Yap. It has a population of 11,000 and is largely unvisited except by divers, but it’s a very popular place with economists talking about the nature of money, starting with a ...”

“... wit, the delicate fancy of your genius, so surprising always in its sudden swallow-flights towards north or south, towards sun or moon, and, above all, you yourself … London is a desert without your dainty feet, and all the buttonholes have turned to weeds: nettles and hemlock are “the only wear”.’ In April 1895, before his trial, he wrote to More Adey ...”

“... yet name: it’s a tantalising guide, innuendo just short of the really useful statement. On the north side of the Thames ‘there are two pubs which attract queers with more esoteric interests’ – i.e. ‘the leather, plastic and rubber cult’ – but the ‘homosexual motor-cyclist enthusiasts’ who might like to drop in are left scanning the shore ...”

“... the novel needs another force, which emerges as the more determined and unconflicted figure of Paul Muniment, who is all outwardness, decisiveness and manliness, with politics that are focused, thought-out, physical, set against Robinson’s ambiguous sexual and social presence. But drama in the novel can only occur when Hyacinth’s bookishness, his soul ...”

“... the Helms Amendment, named after its advocate, the Republican senator Jesse Helms, who represented North Carolina, and was famous for having whistled ‘Dixie’ while in an elevator with the first Black senator, and for likening abortion to the Holocaust. He saw the Supreme Court’s ruling as an exploitation of judicial power, and immediately dedicated ...”