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“... standard-issue purple balaclava and a banana taped to his hairy stomach. He stands in front of the white wall of an art gallery; a label to his left reads ‘The Impossible Dream of a Pubic Fruit’ and an audience looks up at his giant grey legs. The image is one of five thousand that make up the digital artist Beeple’s collage Everydays: The First 5000 ...”

“... extracts from colonial and 19th-century American ‘captivity narratives’: that is, accounts by white women of their abduction by Native American tribes. The extracts’ theme is the deaths of children and the gentleness of mothers, on which Mlinko comments: ‘Gentleness (I know)/is learned. And unlearned also.’ Not unlearned fast enough when the Quahadi ...”

“... in a Land Rover up Firle Beacon for an ‘airing’, or take her to lunch at the White Hart in Lewes or the Cavendish Hotel in Eastbourne. I would sometimes see this curious couple on the farm track – receiving a genial acknowledgment from Logan and a look of puzzlement from the tiny, swathed figure beside him, only just able to see out of ...”

“... quest for food. Between 1918 and 1920, the Pavlovs lost their youngest son Vsevolod to the White Army in the civil war (after the Red victory he fled to Constantinople), and their middle son Viktor to typhus, contracted on his way to join the Whites. Pavlov’s brother Sergei died in 1919. His relatives and neighbours succumbed to hunger, disease and ...”

“... as he may have been, Bush hasn’t been oblivious of his father. When he was a student at Yale, William Sloane Coffin, the theologian who was taken to court for leading protests against the draft during the Vietnam war, told Bush that his father had lost his campaign to become a Texas senator in 1964 to ‘a better man’: Ralph Yarborough, unlike Bush ...”

“... him less as earnestly boyish and more as a gifted manipulator. After Mar learns of Lovecraft’s white supremacist beliefs, she refers to him in the jargon of her profession as a ‘problem person’, and it seems appropriate to give Charlie’s brittle brilliance over to a therapist narrator. Just when Mar’s explanatory diagnostics start to feel cloying ...”

“... of King Philip IV of Spain for $475,000, the highest price he had ever paid for a painting. William Randolph Hearst shipped over cartloads of hispano-moresque plates, furniture, choir screens, even entire cloisters for his new castle in California. As one Spanish reporter put it, ‘we discovered America, and now Americans have discovered ...”

“... at Marham was made a permanent military unit. Lord Tedder’s RAF Deputy Chief of Staff, Sir William Dickson, proposed that the US bases remain designated as Royal Air Force stations: a cosmetic disguise intended to alleviate local hostility to the presence of foreign military forces on British soil in peacetime. The proposal was accepted, and on this ...”

“... friends and fellow alumni of the Slade: Paul and John Nash, C.R.W. Nevinson, Edward Wadsworth, William Roberts and David Bomberg. They were all influenced, directly or indirectly, by Fry’s Post-Impressionist exhibition of 1910, which introduced the British to Continental art, especially Cézanne, but they were able to develop their own work with an ...”

“... The British reappear in the strange voyage of the Batchelors’ Delight, 1683-5, captained by William Ambrosia Cowley and controlled by the more piratical William Dampier. A storm blew them to the Falklands – they had been ‘discoursing of the intrigues of women’, which brings bad weather – and they saw ‘foul ...”

“... criticism is said to be ‘rather like a laboratory in which some of the staff are seated in white coats at control panels, while others are throwing sticks in the air or spinning coins’. Merely by using the simile – with its throwaway formulation, ‘rather like’ – Eagleton defines himself as the second kind of critic and implicitly detaches ...”

“... nothing can console us, when we think it over.’ Even in his favourite ice-cream sundae, a ‘white lady’, the hero has found an emblem of disintegration. I watched the white lady melting. Watched the vanilla melt imperceptibly under the topping of hot chocolate. Watched the scoop of ice-cream, almost perfectly round ...”

“... The Life and Letters volume reprints the first biography, by his masterly literary executor William Frederic Badé. The narrative is laced with Muir’s letters, which rival Lawrence’s in the wholeheartedness of their responses to life around him and to his correspondents. In them we see a man at one with himself and with the granite, the fast ...”

“... of the kings of France, trade routes to Islam, routes of Viking invasions – thus, so, black and white, and not otherwise. What lies behind it all? History of this kind maximises one’s information, minimises doubt. Its authors are pressed into shorthand statements, which often invite one tacitly to assume that things have not changed very much since the ...”

“... Reagan, of Hollywood, Disneyland and John Wayne. Nixon would have lost his home state and the White House in 1968 without his Southern California support. At the 1984 Republican Convention, Reagan, our second Southern California President, was the subject of a celebratory film: it was introduced, as Richard Slotkin points out in Gunfighter Nation ...”