“... 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 ...”

“... in 1942, or cavalry regiments in 1916 – symbols of conservatism rather than of the ‘white heat’ of technology. The advances in military science in recent years have been in terms of the accuracy of missiles and aircraft rather than in nuclear warheads. Not only do nuclear weapons not bring much prestige, but they have failed to cause political ...”

“... to appeal directly to the British sovereign. He mentions, for instance, the gifts sent to William IV and Queen Adelaide by the new king of Oudh in 1834. But he does not record the humiliating fate of those gifts. That story is told vividly by Emily Hannam in Eastern Encounters, the sumptuous volume that accompanied the recent exhibition at the ...”

“... that women thought clean-shaven men were ‘incomplete’. He was in the habit of carrying a large white bone – it was, he claimed, a Tahitian club, invaluable for beating off anyone who sought to molest him. He rode round town on a white pony, painted sometimes with purple and black spots, sometimes purple all ...”

“... and historical canon largely involved the insertion, repudiation or reordering of a cast of dead white males. Since then, there have been efforts to expand disciplinary canons to incorporate more women and greater racial and ethnic diversity. At first glance, the inclusion of Catharine Macaulay’s writings in the influential Cambridge Texts in the History ...”

“... Viking Age was succeeded within three weeks by the start of a Second Age, with the victory of William of Normandy at Hastings. By 1100, Norman princes ruled not only England and most of Wales, with much of Scotland and Ireland soon to follow, but also Apulia and Calabria in southern Italy, and Sicily. They had started the process of picking off parts of ...”

“... which for four years was methodically (and, from the South Coast, audibly) reduced to mush. Sir William Orpen, visiting the Somme battlefield six months after the slaughter, reported vividly and unexpectedly: no words could express the beauty of it. The dreary, dismal mud was baked white and pure – dazzling ...”

“... summer of 1743, the English engraver George Vertue paid tribute to his friend the ‘ingenious’ William Taverner, who ‘besides his practice of the Law ... has an extraordinary Genius in drawing and painting Landskips, equal if not superior in some degree to any painter in England’. Like other contemporary amateur producers of landscape ...”

“... his friend George Trow, a staff writer at the New Yorker. Trow organised a lunch with Kincaid and William Shawn, then editor of the New Yorker, at the Algonquin. Kincaid ordered the most expensive item on the menu – a seafood salad – while Shawn had a bowl of cornflakes (or so she wrote in one essay; elsewhere she gives a different account). At the end of ...”

“... argue that the pivotal moment was in January 1983, when the Conservative home secretary William Whitelaw introduced the Public Order Manual of Tactical Options and Related Matters, a classified handbook drawn up by the Home Office and the Association of Chief Police Officers, which permitted the use of ‘military-style tactics’ against ...”

“... 23 January), but there are also sober faces and black coats that contrast crisply with white neckcloths and turned up collars to set off the male complexions. There are some tremendous pictures among the things gathered here. Pictures of ‘real genius’? Well ‘genius’ is not an easy word, but certainly vivid, appealing and, sometimes, as in ...”

“... begged for copies of Barbara Pym, while Gregory spoke wistfully of Philip Larkin. Denton Welch was William Burroughs’s main intellectual squeeze. Ferlinghetti had high hopes for Jeremy Reed. The Beats were now heritage fodder, a potential Bloomsbury group. There was even talk of James Ivory optioning a Neal Cassady property. I wondered, thinking of Blake’s ...”

“... the end never incorporated into a finished poem; the poet, says Jonathan Wordsworth, could only be William Wordsworth. It seems wholly true, and Wordsworthianness is very well brought out in the discussion that follows – a sensitive, lucid, light prose-paraphrase which includes the reflection that ‘hairs’ is much better than ‘hair’ would have ...”

“... than anything painters commonly manage comes through. Sir John Herschel’s stubbly chin and wild white hair as they emerge from draped velvet in Julia Margaret Cameron’s photograph do not conform to the painterly canon of images of great men. But many early art photographs do recall paintings. Country people in Peter Henry Emerson’s pictures from the ...”