“... iron birds looked disapproval With rusty invidious beaks Among the water-lillies A splash – white foam in the dark! And you lay sobbing then Upon my trembling intuitive arm. He felt the disapproval of the iron birds to be an important clue to the couple’s ‘immoral’ behaviour, and he knew from his experience on the Force that ‘people who go into ...”

“... poem in 1965, and through the good offices of his younger poet friend Gael Turnbull, he found the white-haired Peggy, now married and the mother of two grown daughters, near Wolverhampton in the West Midlands. Having not seen her in 50 years, Basil turned up with a copy of the poem, which is dedicated to her, and they began a second love affair. Sima, then in ...”

“... sexual undercurrent’ in MacLiammóir’s account of Welles’s physical impact (‘small white teeth, a buckling up of the eyes into two oblique slits, a perplexed knitting of the sparse darkly coloured brows, and a totally unexpected darting forth of a big pale tongue’) reappears in heterosexual, or nominally heterosexual, contexts. John ...”

“... to ensure that it isn’t only the rich who can vindicate their rights. The Attlee government’s white paper said that the system introduced under the 1949 Legal Aid and Advice Act was intended to ensure that ‘no one will be financially unable to prosecute a just and reasonable claim or defend a legal right.’ Unlike the National Health Service, founded ...”

“... land at Wardenclyffe on the northern shore of Long Island, and commissioned the architect Stanford White to build a laboratory like no other on earth. In the few years that Tesla occupied Wardenclyffe, it stood as a great work of science fiction, a counterpart of Wells’s time machine or Frankenstein’s laboratory which had, somehow, made it off the page. A ...”

“... powerboat racing career. He entered the 1963 Daily Express race in his top of the range boat The White Migrant and his schoolfriend, who was at Lord’s for the day, recalls the story unfolding in headlines in the Evening Standard. At lunchtime it was ‘Surprise Leader in Powerboat Race’; by close of play it was ‘Powerboat Sinks’. ‘Well,’ his ...”

“... In Berkeley, he took classes with the historian Ernst Kantorowicz, became friends with the poets Kenneth Rexroth and Robin Blaser, and formed an intense alliance with Jack Spicer that set the stage for the San Francisco Renaissance and later curdled into an open and often hostile rivalry. During one energetic six-month period he met or made contact with ...”

“... team regularly plays, and plays very traditionally with no lurid lycra kit but in immaculate white flannels and caps. The players seem to be largely taxi drivers, their cabs parked on the road or, as today, by the actual field. With no interest in cricket we’re both of us cheered by this old-fashioned spectacle and the players who go to the trouble to ...”

“... Memorial Theatre at Stratford-on-Avon was closed. But around 11 a.m. a girl called Eileen White noticed ‘an awful lot of smoke’ pouring from the back of the building. When she told her aunt she was reassured that it was only ‘Mr Gisbourne’s bonfire’. An hour later, the theatre manageress, Alice Rainbow, was finally warned that the building ...”

“... back to see the original. Portions of it, particularly the bits of opus sectile in black and white, I’d like to grub up and frame, but some of it seems crude and the colours vulgar and I’ve no means of knowing whether the parts I like are the original stones and the vulgar bits Victorian renovation or the other way round. Certainly the much later ...”

“... to sweep the ‘dead wood’ from the boardrooms and subject venerable institutions to the ‘white heat’ of modern technology, history carried the stigma of being old-fashioned, and there was a concerted attempt to abandon earlier periods and drag the subject kicking and screaming into the 20th century. As J.H. Plumb, that weathervane of the liberal ...”

“... the corner of the room. So Plimpton fills 31 pages with talk of the night of Truman’s Black and White Ball, but only 24 pages with his entire childhood. (This is a less happy Boswellian trait.) The party method favours the party-goers, and you’d be better off in the company of Gerald Clarke’s biography, published ten years ago, if you wanted to know ...”

“... a longing for Scurry of satyr-hooves in dewy lands, Pan-pipes at noon, the lust, the shaggy fur, White blossoms and swift Dionysiac mirth.It wasn’t very good, but Hilda liked its author. By the end of the month they had moved in together, or at least lived in separate rooms in the same house, 6 Church Walk in Kensington. They were still seeing a good deal ...”

“... that in colleges at Oxford and Cambridge or on the top floors of country houses. But scrubbed and white-painted as these quarters may have been, cramped they certainly were and often situated behind and adjacent to the state rooms and grand corridors where the ceremonial life of the court was led. Access to these back parts is through doors flush with the ...”

“... at the Dorchester. ‘I quite liked him being the waiter; he was rather a good waiter. Dressed in white he was OK.’ Some years later, in France (‘I may have a sadistic streak, I think’), he encouraged Clement to take a ride on a helter-skelter: ‘I was down below watching him go round, roaring with laughter at his fear and anger; he couldn’t get off ...”