“... elaborate distancing from the feel of the photographic – the blurring and smearing, the way black and white seem to drift towards a weaker, less inflected, more listless overall grey – end up achieving? What does the artist do to the ‘photographic’ and the ‘painted’, as he receives the categories from the culture at ...”

“... the Daily Mail, a full-length Singer Sargent portrait, The Diary of a Nobody. In 1896, A. & C. Black purchased the rights to a dull annual almanac called Who’s Who and relaunched it the following year in a format designed to appeal to contemporary taste. The original Who’s Who of 1849 consisted of lists: members of the royal household, the House of ...”

“... Mandelson’s lobbying firm, Global Counsel, founded in November 2010 with his former staffer Benjamin Wegg-Prosser, proved the best vehicle for his ambitions. Global Counsel acts as a concierge service for large corporations, arranging meetings with politicians and advising on weakening or circumnavigating regulations. It does not disclose its client ...”

“... his brethren’ – and this text was used by Early Modern Europeans to justify the translation of black Africans into the doleful state of chattel slavery. I can’t remember anyone in the whole Shakespearean oeuvre who shows any zest for physical labour except the gravedigger in Hamlet. The Bard’s own works, however, have been regarded with almost the ...”

“... a turnip – there is an echo here of Wyndham Lewis’s appraisal of her ‘prose-song … a cold, black suet-pudding … Cut it at any point, it is the same thing … all fat, without nerve’ – but also a literary aristocrat, an ‘aesthetician’ of ‘Methuselah prodigiousness’, ‘dandyish in her handsome wools and velvety in her sentences’ because ...”

“... been, in favour of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races.’ Lincoln was a Republican, of course, but John Kerry’s journey has been a very modern one for a Democrat, a journey around every aspect of himself and every issue pressing in America, cutting and rounding and paring away as he goes, making jigsaw ...”

“... on our way to a bookshop. Sontag was wearing her trademark intellectual-diva outfit: voluminous black top and black silky slacks, accessorised with a number of exotic, billowy scarves. These she constantly adjusted or flung back imperiously over one shoulder, stopping now and then to puff on a cigarette or expel a series ...”

“... was handled: foul-smelling industries, the manufacture of ordnance, brewing, confectionery, black smoke palls and sickly-sweet perfumes. The cloacal mud of low tide mingled deliriously with sulphurous residues trapped in savage greenery: the bindweed, thorns and dark berries of the riverside path. The peninsula thrives on secrecy. For as long as anyone ...”

“... experience, at least some composers). Between the singer and listener stands the song, a kind of black box, and what the singer puts in is not altogether what the listener takes out. Since the singer has no access to the song except through the words, and since he cannot sing the words as though they were only partially intelligible, the possibility that the ...”

“... He had brought along what I’d asked to see. And he pulled out a lined school jotter bound in black linen: there were the poems. They were all he had. They were thirty-odd in number. They filled the thin notebook with their beautiful, crisp handwriting, which ran smoothly and evenly, without anything unruly or fancy. It was rare for a single word to be ...”

“... illustration. Guenther acknowledges the success of Nazi male chic – those ravishing, stiff black SS uniforms so romanticised in movies – but only to exclude men’s fashion from her account. She instead makes clear why there could be no Nazi chic for women. Since the 18th century, Jews had created and purveyed virtually all German elegance; and under ...”

“... of specimens and landscapes); and four servants from his Lincolnshire estate (two of them black). His luggage included a pair of greyhounds, a dog and a bitch called Lady (for hunting); a skiff (for netting marine specimens); a vast quantity of paper (for dried plants); glass cases, boxes and bottles; high-end optical instruments; fishing nets and ...”

“... became plain that summer, when it was instrumental in distributing participants’ coverage of the Black Lives Matter protests, one of the largest civil rights mobilisations in US history. A year later, it had a billion active users worldwide. Today, it is the fifth most popular social media platform, behind Instagram (with which it is catching up ...”

“... cool, cruel blue to Townshend’s three-minute psychodrama – ‘I look all white/but my dad was black’ – was the brief, paradoxical flare of Mod: the story of how a small cabal of British jazz obsessives conducting a besotted affair with the style arcana of Europe and America somehow became an army of scooter-borne rock fans, draped in the ambiguous ...”

“... of Woke, aka Anti Social Justice Warriors, or ‘Anti-SJW’, as they proclaim themselves on their black T-shirts, available online for £15. This switch-around isn’t entirely new. Thirty years ago, in There’s No Such Thing as Free Speech, Stanley Fish wrote that ‘lately, many on the liberal and progressive left have been disconcerted to find that ...”