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“... Nations of the famed Iroquois Confederacy were represented. The focus of their attentions was a white man living in their midst, whose father had died the previous winter far away in Ireland. They would arrive in groups at this man’s large and stately home, and would enact for him their ancient tribal ceremonies of ‘condolence’. They would adorn his ...”

“... in Algeria? An embittered hunter insinuates that Morel is ‘undermining the good name of the white man’ on behalf of Cairo or Moscow: a cynical strategy, the governor muses, since under any revolutionary regime ‘the elephants would be the first to die.’ For the anti-colonial rebels who associate themselves with Morel for publicity ...”

“... aren’t. The narrative voice in Nothing to Be Frightened Of is less complacent than Metroland’s Christopher Lloyd, less irascible than Geoffrey Braithwaite, but has the same enviable suavity that marks out all Barnes’s writing. And the fear of death isn’t a new thing for him to own up to: in Metroland, ...”

“... Now, just as an indication of how the party’s changing, Wilfred got selected for Chippenham – white, middle-class, you know, deepest Wiltshire. And Wilfred tooled up to the selection meeting, wearing his jeans and an open-necked shirt, and just took them by storm. And they love him.’ ‘Do you want to meet Wilfred?’ the press officer ...”

“... private venture capital firm. One of Palantir’s founders, the billionaire Peter Thiel, described Christopher Columbus as ‘the first multiculturalist’, accused Aimé Césaire of not understanding the transcendental value of The Tempest and advocates for cyberspace, outer space and sea-steading as routes of escape from ‘the unthinking demos’. His ...”

“... people will steal.’ There was no light in the stables. He directed a torch around the flaking white walls and onto a floor of uneven stone. Bits of my father’s aircraft lay scattered across it with identifying tags wired round them as if on corpses’ toes. When Nick moved the torch the shadows leaned expressionistically. ‘You see how much we’ve got ...”

“... gave me that I threw away Monday nite because I was so spoiled and couldn’t immediately have a white pickup truck I wanted? What do I do? The Executioner’s Song has a respect for ideas, and yet ideas are not to the book’s own purpose. It is Gilmore and the others who are entitled to purposeful ideas, as when Gilmore addresses the Pardons Board: ‘He ...”

“... beautiful musical prodigy from Wales who, to the disapproval of her secular husband, was also a white-robed member of the British Druid Order. She died at the age of 25 during an appendectomy; they’d been married for little more than a year. The surgery was performed at Jones’s father’s house, rather than at Swansea hospital, which was only four miles ...”

“... less austere taste, there was the Dolce & Gabbana extravagance of Garibaldi, who entered Rome on a white horse, wearing a red jacket and a small black felt hat, his chestnut hair falling in tousled tresses to his broad shoulders. Never far from Garibaldi was his companion Andrea Aguyar, the son of slaves from Uruguay, who had committed his life to the Italian ...”

“... starched butterfly collars and a narrow black tie. His drawing-rooms had black walls (semi-gloss), white ceilings and woodwork, green painted floors and yellow curtains. Much of what is reported of Lutyens suggests that, often in admirable ways, he never grew up. The jokes, puns and flippancy, which he used to cover his sense of social inadequacy, the funny ...”

“... and art historian – it is as a sympathetic critic of some of the quieter poets (Clare, Barnes, Christopher Smart) and an acrid critic of many others, including most of his contemporaries, that Grigson is first thought of. Not Mr Grigson the poet, his eye in a fine frenzy rolling, but Mr Grigson the critic, his eye beadily turned on pretension, inflation ...”

“... I read Christopher Woodward’s book in August and then reread it in September: what a difference a month can make. Insistent images of newly ravaged places, like the ghostly fretwork silhouette which looms over Ground Zero, seem to sneer at us, laughing at our fragile optimism. The notion of the ruin as an expression of violence and blind hatred is not Woodward’s subject, however hard it may be to avoid the connection ...”

“... and ‘Evidence in the Eliot Case’ (1996) – this last featuring a notably unkind commentary on Christopher Ricks’s editing of Eliot’s Inventions of the March Hare: Poems 1909-17. In the new book, as in these essays, Raine assumes that his readers are likely to be ‘somewhat impure and apt to confuse issues’. It is my impression that he remained ...”

“... The implication, perhaps, is that the 1980s were judged by the two editors, Leonard Michaels and Christopher Ricks, to be likely to rate correctness of language above its political and social implications, while the 1990s will reverse these priorities. There is little point in taking issue with this, since in practice such divisions don’t hold fast: most ...”

“... feasts,/Haunting the granaries of words like breasts’, ‘Who would have thought it? At the White Gates/She let them do whatever they liked’), or the customary brew of voyeurism and Catholicism:The white towelling bathrobeungirdled, the hair still wet,first coldness of the underbreastlike a ciborium in the ...”