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“... Johnson City (the location for Verghese’s story), the percentage of the population who are non-white is listed to reassure prospective visitors (7.2 per cent, for the record). Tourism trades happily on this humiliating past. Henning, the birthplace of Alex Haley; the Lorraine Motel, Memphis, where Martin Luther King was assassinated on 3 April ...”

“... The Conservative share in the polls in 1987 on the day Tim Bell rode into Downing Street on a white charger was 44 per cent. One week later, after the expenditure of all the serious money on advertising, their share of votes came out at ... 43 per cent. It wasn’t the media in 1987 which gave Mrs Thatcher her third historic victory. It was her megaphone ...”

“... his preference was for the humbler creatures that inhabited the scrappy fields around Chitry (‘white cattle, as immobile as the linen spread out on the hedges to dry’), in Paris he made trips to the zoo or the Jardin des Plantes, finding ‘red-headed parrots, creaking like rusty chains’, ‘a black swan with red bill, like an alcoholic priest’ and ...”

“... embedded. He worries over the preparation of Friday Evening Discourses for the RI. He analyses white lead paint for Trinity House, the Tudor corporation that maintained Britain’s necklace of lighthouses. During the Crimean War, he advises the Admiralty on the feasibility of an attack on the Baltic port of Cronstadt, using ships filled with four hundred ...”

“... benefits the war might bring for Germany: ‘On the day that the Kaiser and his paladins on their white chargers ride victorious through the Brandenburg Gate, history will have lost all meaning,’ he wrote. Published in 1919, the aphorism was widely quoted by his enemies as evidence of his defeatism. Yet, when his influence within AEG increased after his ...”

“... went to meet Lugo at his headquarters in the northern suburbs of Asunción. With greying hair and white beard, he has an authoritative air. His advisers say they have had to persuade him to leave out the traditional episcopal blessing at the end of his speeches, and his manner is certainly benign and avuncular. With a huge throaty laugh, he asks me if I want ...”

“... and brutality to evidence of defeatism and dissent in many areas, executing anybody found waving a white flag at the approaching Allied forces, shooting Jewish and other slave labourers, killing stragglers in the notorious ‘death marches’ of prisoners evacuated from the camps that lay in the path of the Soviet invaders, and hunting down deserters. In one ...”

“... interest in the English pastoral. Delacroix visited England in 1825, meeting both Lawrence and Richard Parkes Bonington; the trip inspired his outdoor portrait of Louis-Auguste Schwiter, which Degas later bought for his private collection. Degas’s own instincts as a painter throw the difficulties of the genre into relief. The ‘fancy picture’, as it ...”

“... one had been writing in pencil in a large notebook, and now they had gathered, with bottles of white wine standing on the grass between them, and they were settling down to discuss a member of the family whose arrival had been delayed. Was he a contented person, or a discontented person? Did he really belong to the town, or to the country? Would he have ...”

“... that came after Frenzy, the narrator asks the reader, ‘Have you to this point assumed that I am white?’, since convention dictates that a black character is ‘required to comb his Afro hairdo, speak on the street using an obvious, ethnically identifiable idiom, live in a certain part of a town, or be called a nigger by someone’. And as Brandon Taylor ...”

“... number of artists and writers have made Bolinas their home, or one of their homes. One of them was Richard Brautigan. When I gave a reading 16 years ago at the Bolinas Public Library, a couple of Brautigan’s old friends from his North Beach days in the 1960s told me that he had recently turned up in town. I remember hoping that he might come to the reading ...”

“... a self-disciplined and abstemious diner with an enthusiasm, years ahead of his time, for light white wines and salad. (His headquarters in Utrecht now house a passable restaurant.) This influential tract, which remained in circulation as late as the mid-17th century owing to its perceived application to the doings of subsequent favourites (as Perry’s ...”

“... which has sometimes won me the reputation of an eccentric,’ Graves writes at the start of The White Goddess (1948), his synoptic account of the history of Western myth. His eccentricity took many forms, as many as the mercurial goddess herself, yet Graves seems never to have doubted the central narrative to which his life and work were dedicated: There ...”

“... outlines, to an extreme position that is the essence of the dance step. Much of the catalogue by Richard Kendall (who also produced an excellent catalogue for the 1996 exhibition Degas: Beyond Impressionism) and Jill DeVonyar is about making images of things that happened too fast to be recorded by the most attentive eye or quickest hand. But the exhibition ...”

“... effect of the pieces at Gagosian is more fanciful and stylish than critical. The gallery – high white rooms, attendants in black – is itself a bit Ballardian, and the works, like old pictures of St Anthony taunted by devils and caressed by sirens, offer the eye lubricious, melancholy or violent bait that you can take without finding when you do that you ...”