“... colours, a sure sign that Jamaica’s ‘pigmentocracy’ was alive and well. The ‘not quite white’ Browns gathered on their verandas to drink rum punch, served by their Black servants (soon to be renamed ‘helpers’); they looked to Britain and wondered anxiously what was to come. Six decades later the island feels very different. Marley and Manley ...”

“... shared in the 1970s and early 1980s. In February 1974 the head of the home civil service, Sir William Armstrong, suffered a dramatic nervous breakdown in Downing Street, convinced that democracy itself was at stake in the miners’ confrontation with Ted Heath’s government. When Armstrong’s colleague Sir Douglas Allen, the permanent secretary at the ...”

“... tell you his story,not tapping into memory but into time,and refire the first salvo for the endof white hegemony in Central Africa.You must come along. Whether you’re aCaribbean in Brixton able to instruct me,or white middle class in Surrey,or an elderly person on welfare in Consett,or a blurty-eyed young person,whether ...”

“... order, colour, and occasionally the wording’ – so says David Bindman in his introduction to William Blake: The Complete Illuminated Books (Thames and Hudson, 480 pp., £39.95, 30 October, 0 500 51014 8). Obviously not many such books could be printed, which accounts for their extreme rarity, but Blake thought his method greatly preferable to the one ...”

“... do harsh things when attacking a barbaric enemy guilty of the ultimate ‘sacrilege’: killing white children. What looked like ruthlessness was ‘vision’ – as savage Africa was bound to fall to civilised powers, Rhodes was right to urge that it would benefit not just the settlers but Africans to make as much of it British as possible. Even Schreiner ...”

“... that good.’ It’s an effortful business, and, it seems, a full-time job, but hardly unusual in William Gibson’s futuristic fiction, which often features characters whose sensitivity to ambient data borders on the supernaturally acute. His last but one, Idoru (1996), introduced Colin Laney, an ‘intuitive fisher of patterns of information . . . the ...”

“... William Golding’s Rites of Passage, which appeared seven years ago, purported to be an account, by a young toff, good-natured but still wet behind the ears, of a voyage to Australia, around 1814, in a clapped-out English warship reduced to carrying emigrants. Keeping a journal for the amusement of his noble patron, he tells of a comical amorous adventure with an emigrant female, a patronising friendship with an ex-lower-deck first lieutenant (‘allow me to congratulate you on imitating to perfection the manners and speech of a somewhat higher station in life than you were born to’), and various puppyish acts of indiscipline and breaches of Naval etiquette which set him at odds with the captain ...”

“... source. My bias, which I will attempt to overcome, tends towards the more cynical view ascribed to William Burroughs by Jack Kerouac. ‘When you start separating the people from their rivers what have you got? Bureaucracy!’ Having triumphantly ghosted London’s autobiography, Ackroyd’s obvious follow-up was the Thames: generator of life, origin of the ...”

“... Harbour. The sea here was calm, the low-lying land, dotted with pastel-coloured houses with white roofs, slipped past easily. We passed a couple of rusty old buoys used to tether warships in World War Two; these days common terns nest there to escape the rats that live on shore. Then we travelled through St George’s Channel between Paget Island and ...”

“... William Spencer Cavendish, sixth Duke of Devonshire, was born ‘in a somewhat furtive manner for a baby of his exalted rank’. In 1790 his father, the fifth Duke, and his mother, the giddy Duchess Georgiana, had been travelling in the Low Countries, where the Austrian threat became such that they bolted for the safety of Revolutionary Paris ...”

“... of the planet’s history. And something in common, too, with the myth-making in Rousseau or William Morris that offers visions of hope or disaster for mankind. The myth-making here seems, by comparison, unpersuasive – being vague on the lost values of the past (‘voluntary submission to the great Whole’) and both vague and cranky on the continuing ...”

“... St Francis, and so on. Stereotyping is particularly evident in the case of religious apparitions. William Christian, an anthropologist turned historian, has been studying apparitions in Late Medieval Spain. St Ildefonso, St Anthony of Padua and St Michael the Archangel all made their appearance, but the dominant figure was that of the Virgin Mary. At Jaen in ...”

“... according to the 1790 Naturalisation Act, they did not qualify because they weren’t ‘free white persons’. Despite this, their petition was granted by a court clerk who knew them well. They settled in Wilkesboro, North Carolina, at the foot of the Blue Ridge Mountains, where they had a large and comfortable house built, chose a surname – Bunker ...”

“... August), there are many examples of that freshness: two of the most famous, Thomas Girtin’s The White House at Chelsea and Turner’s Blue Rigi, hang side by side. There is also Bonington’s view of the Piazza dell’Erbe in Verona, which gives a sense of moving crowds and shifting light that makes Canaletto’s Venetian crowds and calm yellow sunshine ...”

“... their foreign minister has made an official complaint to the UN about the submarine – William and Willetts they can take in their stride. The British ambassador to the UN had nothing to say about nuclear submarines but claimed it was ‘manifestly absurd’ to say that Britain was militarising the region, while that organ of the Ministry of ...”