“... gypsum alabaster and calcite or onyx alabaster. Calcite alabaster from Egypt, commonly a creamy white with more translucent golden bands, is sometimes petalled, fleecy or cloudy in pattern, and darker types can occasionally resemble toffee. Its watery origin – often as stalactites – must have been well known and probably contributed to the old idea that ...”

“... the sort of charity-show swagger that mugs you with its understated discretion. Brilliant white collars, sharp enough to chop onions. Exuberant manacles of cuff. Silk ties forcibly repressed into knuckle sized knots. Ferociously bulled black shoes to mirror the action, dizzy from stomping on rib cages, hacking at kidneys, leaving hoofprints of polish ...”

“... with any aspect of foreign policy … I can confirm that there have never been, whether in White House talks, in telegrams, in ambassadorial approaches, or even on the hot line, any attempts to link Vietnam with economic or monetary co-operation. In a cabinet meeting in February 1966 Wilson again denied the link, and Richard Crossman, the minister of ...”

“... a microchip factory. In Ruth Berghaus’s Frankfurt Götterdämmerung, described in some detail by Patrick Carnegy, the murdered Siegfried ‘was not solemnly borne aloft but brutally kicked aside by Hagen’s men’. Not all of these images are stupid or anti-musical, but as a whole they are symptoms of a process that has invaded opera over the past thirty or ...”

“... shoulders. There are virtues in the anti-Laudian interpretation, too, for a historian like Patrick Collinson, who approaches the 1630s not backward from the Civil War but forward from the Elizabethan and Jacobean period. Collinson observes the success of pre-Laudian Puritanism in working within the Church, sees that the Puritan opposition to ...”

“... had arranged all this out of kindness. Then there is the Prettiman marriage – Miss Granham in white looking very well – a ceremony conducted barbarously by the Captain: Talbot is nevertheless much moved and he lies on his bunk in tears. Waking he hears a metallic hammering far below, understands that the hot-iron operation is proceeding (the sea is ...”

“... is no great exporter (France is without Marmite) and the ecologist is his brother, Teddy. Sam White, the Paris columnist of the Evening Standard, and a long-standing friend of Goldsmith, suggested to Richard Ingrams, as the heat died down, that the ‘services’ mistake was really a Wilson/Falkender joke. The ‘ecology’, according to ...”

“... Derek Boshier, Allen Jones and Peter Phillips were all enrolled at the School of Painting; Patrick Caulfield joined a year later. Boty socialised with them all outside class, but unlike them wasn’t always selected for the better student exhibitions. Things changed rapidly after she left, when her old tutor from Wimbledon invited her to exhibit at the ...”

“... off, Sue Ellen’s name is not one to be taken lightly. In comparing her with a Mrs Hazel Pinder White, Jonathan Aitken brought on himself a legal action requiring him to kneel on the sand of Viking Bay, Broadstairs, and apologise publicly. JR’s wife, complained the plaintiff, ‘was nothing but a high-class prostitute who drank heavily and was a total ...”

“... for the unfortunate living and the thickly particulated Lada air they breathe are not. The planner Patrick Abercrombie wrote confidently that ‘modernist design sprang into being after the gap of the war.’This improbable leap – architecture is a slow business – was countered by the sounder opinion of Paul Fussell: ‘It is a mistake to think that the ...”

“... to Coates’s teenage son, Samori, on the occasion of the non-indictment of Brown’s killer, a white police officer called Darren Wilson. ‘We are captured, brother, surrounded by the majoritarian bandits of America,’ he writes in a typically despairing passage: The terrible truth is that we cannot will ourselves to an escape on our own … You have ...”

“... a uniform rule of naturalisation’. Flexing this power in 1790, it invited ‘any free white person’ of ‘good character’ to naturalise. The tens of thousands of men, women and children dragged to North America by the triangular Atlantic trade were not included in this offer and those born of enslaved parents in the United States stood on ...”

“... look compounded of stage flats and wizened textures picked out in brass-rubbing black, ceiling white, royal blue and pillarbox red. Here was a love of the notionally unspoilt, a harking back to George V Georgian and, ideally, to the Georgian of Georges IV, III and II, not to mention the Edwardian of Edward the Confessor. Steeped in the notion of things ...”

“... further undermines the victim. George Cukor’s 1944 film noir Gaslight, based on the 1938 play by Patrick Hamilton, inspired the term, though it took some time to gain ground. Psychoanalytical scholarship first mentioned ‘the gaslight phenomenon’ in the late 1960s. In 1981, two doctors, Victor Calef and Edward Weinshel, gave an account of gaslighting in ...”

“... like the walls of Kabul, made of warm, sagging, straw-flecked mud: they are rigid blocks of grey-white stone. Foreigners have consistently perceived this aspect of the city as – in the words of the French gem-hunter Jean-Baptiste Tavernier in 1640 – ‘not very handsome’, or, in the words of Bartholomew Plaisted in 1752, ‘very disagreeable to ...”