“... to their conclusion. But really after the 1969 Hyde Park Free Concert (Mick’s rather desirable white frock and all those hypocritical butterflies for the newly dead unlamented Brian), Richards’s reiterative narrative of Stones songs, gigs and internal warfare in Life was all news to me, and not all of it riveting. I see that this makes me an unlikely ...”

“... work otherwise. No pain, no gain. Feel the burn. Actually, I’d rather not, and the blessed Patrick Wall, neuroscientist and pain doctor, wishes it to be known that pain is almost entirely useless and good for nothing but getting rid of. He cites cancer pain, with the impatience of one who is suffering it himself, as the apogee of pointlessness. Cancer ...”

“... courageous, though not always as successful. I find it hard to enjoy the florid extravagances of Patrick White’s Voss, while respecting the attempt to make word match fact. Xavier Herbert tried to meet size with size, insisting that his Poor Fellow My Country, close on a million words, be published in a single hardback volume which one day may kill a ...”

“... growth and increasing scarcity of food. Having combined under the banner of United Man, the white nations will take measures to control the inferior races – primarily Chinese and Africans – and eventually to annihilate them, using airplanes to unleash ‘a rain of awful death to every breathing thing, a rain that exterminates the hopeless ...”

“... members – Christopher Cox, Robert Ferro, Michael Grumley, Andrew Holleran, Felice Picano, Edmund White and George Whitmore, together with the film critic Vito Russo and the editor and academic George Stambolian – began producing books whose examination of gay life, though often programmatic, was still infused with the raw brashness of tongues only recently ...”

“... Patrick McGinley’s pastoral parable, The Red Men, begins with Gulban Heron, rural overlord of a hotel, a shop and four sons. There is dark-haired Jack, capable, ruthless, dissolute, his father’s favourite, and there are three carrot-polled losers, the red men of the title: Cookie, a jaded man of letters, typically apt to give life a literary form and content; cynical Joey, with his fire-scarred face, who mistrusts the emotions and gives his mind to geology and shopkeeping; and Father Bosco, with his fire-damped soul, reminiscently plagued by lust and distressed by the loneliness of his calling ...”

“... Heaney’s sixth collection finds him on Station Island, Lough Derg, more commonly known as St Patrick’s Purgatory. It’s the setting for a pilgrimage undertaken by thousands of Irish men and women each year. For three days they fast and pray, deprive themselves of sleep, and walk barefoot round the station ‘beds’ – circles of rough stones said to ...”

“... for the people, romantic nationalism turns its gaze to a mythologised past, as Cuchulain stalks at Patrick Pearse’s side. The colonial past is to be squeezed out by a conjuncture of the very old and the unimaginably new, like the two interleaved texts, one modern and the other Homeric, of Ulysses. The more dewy-eyed forms of nationalism are among other ...”

“... reverberating panels or ‘slabs’, around 1947, he’s home and dry (his solution surely helped Patrick Heron and Howard Hodgkin find their paths out of the maze). The same was true for Barnett Newman with his discovery of the ‘zip’, the vertical line cutting across the continuous and perfectly smooth surface produced by the application of pigment with ...”

“... haven’t got teeth at all, ‘just a row of brown stubs, like iron filings, top and bottom’. White Teeth, Zadie Smith’s polished, attractive fictional debut (LRB, 21 September) didn’t make the shortlist; it seems a shame. Frank Gauci is happy to ‘gamble on anything that moves’, a problem for shortlisted novelists leading sedentary lives, but not ...”

“... hopefully christened the British Commonwealth of Nations. The British never put much money or white manpower into running the Empire, a habit rooted in parsimony but consorting well with the appearance of having greatness thrust upon them. Their agents were spread thinly and enjoyed great autonomy, ruling and sometimes extending their bit of empire with ...”

“... or half-awoke, to what they had done. Ever since the preceding Republican Convention in 1992, when Patrick J. Buchanan had made his fulminant speech about race war and culture war, the line of the prestige columnists and commentators had been that such a farouche gathering had lost the election for the GOP. This was a stupid line: nothing (certainly not a ...”

“... its wet, warm arms, showering her with thousands of greedy, rough kisses, blinding her with the white zigzag explosions of uncountable lightning bolts, deafening her with ear-splitting rolls of thunder ... Then already hopelessly soaked, she stood up straight, offering her body to the powerful surge of water. For an instant the thought crossed her mind to ...”

“... opposed but Henderson put in a superb performance on the beachhead. He requisitioned a large white stallion from a nearby farm and rode down from the dunes; as one veteran remembered half a century later, he ‘wis gettin’ it to rise up on its hind legs, like in an oil painting! And the boys were all cheerin’.’ Splashing through the waves ...”

“... between interested parties on land claims. (The Aboriginal lawyer Noel Pearson once asked how many white people really wanted equality with black ones, given the life-expectancy statistics; on another occasion he shocked a TV interviewer by starting a sentence: ‘Now that I have entered the later part of my life ...’ He was 31 at the time.) The Native Tide ...”