“... than their author ever suspected, and as a moral tutor to some students he never met. How well white hairs may become a fool and ...”

“... always beside you? When I count, there are only you and I together But when I look ahead up the white road There is always another one walking beside you. In the three weeks since she left me another one walks always beside us. It is a great stroke, to turn Eliot’s mysterious third person into the adulterous lover who has created a triangle which will ...”

“... But advancing slowly through the crowd from the left is a woman in a red Phrygian cap astride a white charger. She holds aloft a red flag inscribed with the words ‘Vive la République’ and representing the cause of social revolution. Lamartine fixes her in his gaze and raises his hand in a gesture whose meaning is deciphered by the painting’s ...”

“... something has changed in our relation to Abstract Expressionism. Not so long ago, on entering the white-walled room in a major museum housing the Pollocks, the Stills, the Rothkos and the Newmans, you could easily persuade yourself that here was the culmination of many things. Here, on these outsized canvases, the moment was recorded when New York muscled out ...”

“... before the novel’s opening; at the memorial someone says that he’s now ‘officially a dead white male’. The narrator, who’s meant to be writing a magazine piece about a centre for victims of human trafficking, finds that she can’t do it. Instead, she produces what we’re reading: jottings directed at him. ‘You were not the unhappiest person we ...”

“... streak leading from the back of each eye. Its legs are often described by observers as ‘milky-white’. In the early 19th century there was some experimenting with different names, among them the cream-coloured plover and the cream-coloured swiftfoot, before agreement settled on cream-coloured courser. The word ‘courser’, from the Latin cursor, a ...”

“... If we list all the sentences of the form ‘S’ is true if and only if S, e.g. ‘Snow is white’ is true if and only if snow is white, ‘There are infinitely many prime numbers’ is true if and only if there are infinitely many prime numbers, ‘Australia is a continent’ is true if and only if Australia is a ...”

“... sign.The sign said: ‘Coloured not admitted.’ ‘My playmates,’ Hughes continued, ‘who were white and lived next door to me, could go to that motion picture and I could not. I could never see a film in Lawrence again.’ In elementary school his teacher made ‘unpleasant and derogatory remarks about Negroes’ and he was stoned by classmates on his way ...”

“... Winter weren’t the only ones – was unconsciously aimed at extending the jurisdiction of her white-bread background. Whatever her motives, she did a good job on Roth, who at this point in the biography abruptly mutates into a fervent disciple of Eliot and Joyce. He started wearing pigskin gloves and arranging to be caught ‘muttering snatches of Dante ...”

“... a phthalo green so fucking intense that just a teardrop of this stuff could colonise a blob of white. Michael Boone’s father was a butcher in the small town of Bacchus Marsh near Melbourne – hence his son’s moniker – and Michael is a provincial rebel, determined to remind the metropolis of his raggedness. In Bacchus Marsh, a German art teacher ...”

“... German-Jewish boyhood. ‘My Jew-boy’, Nixon was later to call him – at least once on the White House tapes – and it’s clear that many of Kissinger’s traits were acquired early on in Fürth. His family was one of those which did not identify with the opposition in Bavaria, preferring to stress its patriotic character, its past loyalty to the ...”

“... isn’t an uneccentric figure himself. He’s best known as the amateur historian of fiercely White Russian sympathies who was ordered to pay Lord Aldington £1.5 million in libel damages in 1989 after accusing him of war crimes for his involvement in repatriating troops to Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union after the Second World War. (The award was later ...”

“... Not long after, the discussion group was disbanded. The gatecrasher’s name, we learnt, was Christopher Hitchens, and he apparently did this sort of thing rather often, being famous for a sort of pyrotechnic brashness. Looking back, one realises that these were entirely apposite qualities for the successful journalist, which is very much what Hitchens ...”

“... Christopher Logue’s War Music is not ‘a translation in the accepted sense’. It’s not clear why, having said this, he should invoke Johnson’s remark that a translation’s merit should be judged by ‘its effect as an English poem’, since Johnson was talking about translations, whereas Logue’s poem is a variety of ‘poetical imitation’ and belongs to a perfectly good tradition of English poems based on or played off against an older (often Classical) original ...”

“... as different as the poetry of Carol Ann Duffy, Kate Clanchy or David Kinloch, and the fiction of Christopher Whyte or A.L. Kennedy. Some of these poets and novelists are wary of each other. Jamie recently refused to read with Irvine Welsh because of what she saw as the misogyny of one of his short stories. Yet even such wariness reinforces a sense that these ...”