“... partly a matter of form. Like Diane Arbus and Robert Mapplethorpe, Hujar created square, black and white images, typically using a Rolleiflex or the more sophisticated Hasselblad, plus tripod. The geometry of the square encourages a photographer to centre the subject and face it head on, turning unruly bodies and irregular scenes into fixed primary shapes. But ...”

“... the sex obsession that lay clotted on Ann Veronica and The New Machiavelli like cold white sauce was merely old maid’s mania, the reaction towards the flesh of a mind too long absorbed in airships and colloids.’ No man of Wells’s temperament could resist such baiting, with the result that he and Rebecca West became lovers. Their ...”

“... among ‘members unlimited’. The loyalist reaction against this popular agitation was severe. William Pitt the Younger’s government legislated against ‘seditious’ meetings and writings, and imprisoned leaders of reform societies and printers of the radical press. ‘Church and King’ was the watchword of magistrates and manufacturers, who employed ...”

“... the Puritans who settled colonial New England offers a succinct and not inaccurate summary of white-Indian relations in the United States. Despite the twists and turns of official policy – from Thomas Jefferson’s efforts to assimilate Indians by teaching them to farm (even though they had been doing so for centuries), to Andrew Jackson’s Indian ...”

“... panniers and stomachers. Frankland’s watercolour for 1793 captured the vogue for long folds of white fabric and a body beneath that was clearly no longer tightly corseted.In The Age of Undress, Amelia Rauser examines the fashion that burned brightly, if briefly, at the end of the 18th century. The trend was highly revealing. Breasts had already been on ...”

“... that repetition.’ ‘Really?’ I say trying to hear what they are saying through the din of ‘white trash, white trash’ that their smiles imply. In my head is the cosy paranoia of an Irish sitting-room: Fifties curtains with an urn full of flowers woven into the net, Sixties leaves scattered over the carpet, wallpaper ...”

“... with different motives informing each of them, and very different outcomes. For Britain’s white Australian subjects, colonialism represented a liberation, with most of them (this of course excludes transported felons) becoming far more individually free than their sisters and brothers back in Britain, and at least as free as those – a majority, as ...”

“... campaigner – or that he was Black.He was the son of an enslaved Jamaican woman and the white plantation owner who had raped her. After he left Jamaica as a young man, Wedderburn never returned for fear of being hanged: ‘such’, he wrote of the plantocracy, ‘is their hatred of anyone having black blood in his veins.’ No one tried to hang him ...”

“... the fatal heart attack of his youngest brother, Robertson – of his ‘ideal Elder brother’, William. William died at his summer home in Chocorua, New Hampshire with Henry at his bedside. Only a week earlier Henry had arrived from England with William and his wife, Alice, along with ...”

“... of scarlet in evidence, in the robes of the assembled Council and of sundry invited academics, white in the vestments of the local clergy, and a respectable quantity of gold in the mayoral chains of office; there are any number of sombre grey suits on visiting diplomats and corporate sponsors; and outside the sunshine, if there is any, glints from the ...”

“... in New York an audience is either young or old (in the Lincoln Center, mainly old), black or white (in the Lincoln Center, almost exclusively white), gay or straight (in the Lincoln Center it is often hard to tell). The audience for James Baldwin that evening could not be so easily categorised: it was, I suppose, half ...”

“... and might not; and then, in noticeably poorer country, Irish Republic tricolours, their green-white-orange optimistically symbolising reconciliation between Catholic and Protestant. Signs reading UDA and RIRA (both, in our understanding, illegal organisations) suggested that Ireland is not quite there yet, as did our first roadblock, between Armagh and ...”

“... known to Ruskin). The fashion had even spread to the English lakes, where the Reverend William Gilpin, founder of the cult of the picturesque, claimed that the ‘mixing and commixing’ of reverberations produced ‘a wonderful effect on the mind’. Henriette d’Angeville, on her way to Chamonix, was not too proud to pause at a well-know grotto ...”

“... So there is the cake – ‘Blue icing does look strange … unless I trim it, save out some white for a lattice over the top or garlands’ – but first the ingredients must be measured, and carefully mixed by hand, before it is baked and cut and served. Such is the rule of this writer’s confections: attention to detail presages the ...”

“... verse is significant in other ways: it provides the first printed mention of the deaths of William Shakespeare and Francis Beaumont, who had died four years before, and is a powerful encomium to paper. Taylor identifies two distinct, magical qualities that paper possesses. On the one hand, paper is ‘th’Eternall Testament of all our Weale’: it ...”