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“... public and disappoints them by turning out to have false teeth and a glass eye. The painter Benjamin Haydon approaches a crisis in his unhappy career. Browning annoys Jane Carlyle by putting a hot kettle down on her new carpet. Haydon takes his own life. So, from day to day and street to street, the sublime and the ridiculous appear in the proximity ...”

“... had large numbers of slaves. By mid-century about 40 per cent of population of Virginia was black. Who then bought the convicts? The answer seems to be middling planters who could not afford the increasingly expensive African slaves and who therefore were willing to accept even a convict in hope of obtaining seven years of hard labour in return for an ...”

“... family have for you,’ reads the typing primer; you can see it in cross-stitches, can’t you? Benjamin Franklin would be proud. ‘It’s easy to be clean on the outside,’ murmurs a demonic Shirley Temple in baggy shorts and lanyard. ‘All you need is soap and water and a scrubbing brush. It’s much harder to be clean on the inside.’ Among all this ...”

“... On the evening of 11 April 1865, Abraham Lincoln spoke to a crowd in Washington about black suffrage. The Civil War had been over for a week. Lincoln had already walked the streets of Richmond, Virginia, the Confederate capital, taking in the devastation at first hand. ‘The only people who showed themselves were negroes,’ the radical senator Charles Sumner noted ...”

“... on the Opry, is that, for all his musical talent, he was the exception that proved a rule: black folks were all right, in their place, just so long as that place was out of sight, at the back of the line. Burns also features Charley Pride: the first black regular of ‘Grand Ole Opry since DeFord Bailey decades ...”

“... daughter washing her hair in the kitchen sink. He opens the front door. A figure darts out: ‘black-skinned, woolly-hatted, zip-jacketed, jeaned, it ran past him to the road.’ This is Benjie, delinquent boyfriend of Catherine, Frank’s second eldest daughter. Catherine is ...”

“... ago the lavatory consisted of a sink, a hole in the floor, and an alcove whose wall was thick with black mould. When it was occupied, the patrons used the hall, which was, except for the sink and the hole, indistinguishable from the lavatory. This is one thing I remember about the pub; the other thing I remember is that the pub was called the Jesse ...”

“... artistic couple of any sexual stripe), as celebrated as the earlier musical duo Peter Pears and Benjamin Britten, though they rigorously resist all efforts by the gay community to assimilate them. When Farson asked them for details of their sex life, George became vehement: ‘That’s part of a different story. Not part of the G–G story!’ And Gilbert ...”

“... Ginsberg led the others in this ring-a-roses with the grandees. They met Duchamp, Man Ray and Benjamin Péret at a party (fifty years before the selfie, Ginsberg snogged Duchamp). They ran into Tristan Tzara. Ginsberg and Burroughs paid a visit to Céline in the suburbs. They were greeted by his ferocious dogs (Burroughs must have liked that). Céline ...”

“... action. As we test every category and point of comparison, it’s easy to forget, in the words of Benjamin Cardozo, that analogies, ‘starting as devices to liberate thought … end often by enslaving it’.Laurence Louër and Kim Ghattas follow different but not incompatible lines of exposition as they struggle to make sense of events in the ...”

“... the odd shape of her head, with its slightly protuberant brow and guileless expression. The rich black tones and blurring effects seem photographic, but stranger than straight photography, as if the principle of photomontage had been applied to drawing itself. Kitaj’s bookishness wasn’t only a matter of literary references, which recur in his work; he ...”

“... three months. During a debate organised by progressive Jewish groups Mamdani said he would have Benjamin Netanyahu or Vladimir Putin arrested if they came to New York, in compliance with international warrants for war crimes. Mamdani’s overtures to Jewish organisations haven’t stopped the New York Post and other entities on the right from smearing him ...”

“... blocks, one poem per page. Stonecipher knows her Baudelaire and Brecht, her Bauhaus and Benjamin, her dioramas and dactyliothecae (I had to look it up too). A child of Seattle, she also knows her Starbucks: When we were in Berlin, we stopped and got coffee at Starbucks. When we were in London, we stopped to get coffee at Starbucks. When we were in ...”

“... was the cohesion of a unified settler state in the wake of the American Revolution. Far more than Black slavery, the Native question was central to the reordering of political loyalties on the eastern seaboard. From the vantage of the American colonials, the Indians were, as the historian Colin Calloway has put it, paraphrasing Thomas Jefferson, ‘the ...”

“... momentum. People clustered to watch this marvel, as they had once thronged to see the young Benjamin Franklin, a proselytiser for the virtues of swimming, paring his toenails as he lay on his back in mid-Thames. There seemed no limit to man’s ability to defy the natural laws. It was not essential to limit the number of wheels to two, but tricycles and ...”