“... indictment as decisive in Irish – or at least in Mulvaney’s – eyes: If black is black or white is white, in black and white it’s down, You’re only traitors to the Queen and rebels to the Crown. If print is print or words are words, the learned Court perpends: – We are not ...”

“... when an apparent suicide pilot crashed a single-engined Cessna airplane on the south lawn of the White House in 1994, jokers suggested it might be the CIA director trying to get an appointment with the president. The anti-Communist revolt that began at Herat in western Afghanistan in March 1979 originated in a government initiative to teach girls to ...”

“... of draught animals nor of the wheel. The Anasazi also produced beautiful pottery decorated with white and black geometric designs, built sophisticated irrigation systems and erected astronomical and solar observatories. Man Corn, however, makes no attempt to deal in detail with any of these aspects of Anasazi society. Instead, it concentrates ...”

“... He let the Victorian values down gently. As the values blur, the topiary comes sharply into focus: white hair cascading in patriarchal fashion, beards trimmed and buffed into the emblematic shape of a utensil (spades, mostly) or an armament (Samuel Butler has a ‘torpedo beard of silver grey’). These are hairstyles with attitude. Butler’s torpedo beard is ...”

“... as an instrument of cultural, hence political, hegemony – as a subtle fraud devised by dead white males to reinforce ethnic and sexist oppression, and hinder social change. But he also attacks, usually in tones of benignly lugubrious authority, other critical movements such as the New Historicism, rather less overtly political in tendency, which by ...”

“... for later generations. Technical advances soon acted as a spur to artists and publishers alike. Edmund Evans, after about 1870, perfected the technique of colour-printing from wood blocks, and thereby opened the way for that celebrated trio of the late 19th century, Crane, Caldecott and Kate Green-away – vigorous, sportive and quaint respectively. Whalley ...”

“... seething with wit and brilliance from the likes of Johnson, David Garrick, Sir Joshua Reynolds and Edmund Burke, courtly politicians, cheerful whores, fine lords and ladies, down-at-heel actresses, a time of ‘free-flowing claret and sexual anarchy’, as Roger Hutchinson puts it. Strutting and tumbling through it all – and, of course concocting this ...”

“... conscience on the Anglican priest. (This part of the story is adapted, very movingly, from Edmund Gosse’s Father and Son.) At Oxford, and desperately poor, Oscar is serenely confident God will provide, and so he does, at the race track and dog fights and the card table. A toss of a coin convinced him that God needs him as a missionary to New South ...”

“... likely extent of his readers’ acquirements. A great many people know that dentists commonly wear white jackets; a smaller but still substantial section of society has had the opportunity of observing that stewards on passenger aircraft are (or at one time were) similarly attired. Almost anybody of sufficient education to find the word ‘haemophilia’ even ...”

“... in a quite unprecedented way on their right to pass judgment on the deeds of important dead white males, and to tell and publish the story of the polities that they lived in. Bridget Hill neglects this broader intellectual context for a more narrowly biographical approach in this study of Catharine Macaulay, but hers is still a considerable achievement ...”

“... wasn’t, or wasn’t only, a pulp craftsman embittered by the faint praise he’d been lobbed by Edmund Wilson before the likes of Eliot and Auden announced themselves as fans. Slick magazine writers were no good either – ‘their scenes are almost tiresomely neat … but they are little men who have forgotten how to pray’ – and when discussing the ...”

“... up as a woman when the moon is full. Scobie is the best kind of Orientalist. He walks like ‘a White Man at large’, and he loves the Egyptians. ‘You see, the Egyptians are marvellous, old man,’ he tells Darley. ‘Kindly. They know me well. From some points of view they might look like felons, old man, but felons in a state of grace, that’s what I ...”

“... 18 now known to have been killed: John Ashton, William Bradshaw, Thomas Buckley, James Crompton, Edmund Dawson, Margaret Downes, William Evans, William Fildes, Samuel Hall, Mary Heyes, Sarah Jones, John Lees, Arthur O’Neill, Martha Partington, John Rhodes, Joseph Whitworth, and two special constables, John Ashworth and Robert Campbell. There were ...”

“... in connection with four murders. He is offered wine, and not just any wine but the 2004 white that Commandant Danglard sources from a small grower in the Sancerrois. The suspect enjoys the wine, asking if he can have the details of the supplier. But he’s still reluctant to talk, reluctant above all to cry in front of the cops. They promise him ...”

“... sans situation qu’instable’. He is describing homosexuals, whom he calls ‘inverts’, and to Edmund White’s analysis of this passage in The Proust Project – White sees Proust’s writing on homosexuality as both ‘venomous’ in certain of its assumptions and productive in the sheer array of its ...”