“... towns for two hundred miles. Nashville, the other large city in Tennessee, is regarded as a ‘white’ city and has long been thought of as the home of country music, whereas Memphis is identified with the blues and rock ’n’ roll, and from the 1960s, with soul and R&B. Sam Phillips did not invent rock ’n’ roll, a term coined by the Cleveland DJ ...”

“... of a century of cults and gurus, of sincerity and fraudulence, of hopes and disappointments, Peter Washington detects the faint sound of Blavatsky’s baboon having the last laugh. Washington presents his subject as the rise of the Western guru: in fact, charisma, faith, leader and follower, have never been absent from religion or from history. In the ...”

“... the swimmers smiled and shouted back: ‘Nyet.’ ‘Photos of the event reveal a comic scene,’ Peter Carlson writes, ‘the swimmers waving and cheering, Khrushchev beaming and gesturing grandly, Nixon smiling wanly, his formal white shirt buttoned at the cuffs, his sober black tie fastened tightly at his collar. He was ...”

“... having come in from the cold, as it were, of the Heath years. He has now written a book about Peter Carrington, who resigned, of course, as Foreign Minister after the Argentines invaded the Falklands in April 1982. The book may sell: but not to Lord Carrington. Mrs Thatcher’s England is also the theme of a curious book written by Count Filo della ...”

“... Like his near-namesake, Tristram Shandy, the unlikely hero of Peter Carey’s new novel begins the story of his life at the very beginning. While he doesn’t go into quite as much detail about the moment of his conception, he appears to have a very clear memory of the minutes leading up to his delivery. As his mother leaves her theatre (where she has been rehearsing the Scottish Play) and sets out for the hospital, things started happening faster than she had expected ...”

“... the middle-ranking managerial and technical cadres of industry, proverbially the ICI man-in-the-white-coat; teachers, younger doctors, community workers: people of all kinds who wanted to get on with it, to find scope for their skills and help to build the New Britain. We believed that with Labour and Wilson it could be done. It is important today that we ...”

“... but in an uneasy and nightmarish way. A technical decision – to paint with pure colours on a wet white ground – determined the look of the bright and detailed (as against the dreamy and clouded) kind of Pre-Raphaelite picture. Painfully brilliant carmines and greens; square yards of turf or river bank reproduced near life-size, leaf by leaf and flower by ...”

“... on saving the heritage, but they also find the restored Gothick Tent at Painshill ‘a little too white and pristine’. The huge baroque memorial which Lord Ashton, the linoleum magnate, built to one of his three wives in 1906 cost him £87,000; £600,000 has been found for its restoration. It would make a very fine ruin, and £600,000 would build a fine ...”

“... an erotic element in the original iconography, which was elaborated on demand.’ Cargo ships and white men with bottles and pipes disappear; the market demands that indigenous art speak of indigenous things. Thomas uses the Palauan example in convincing support of the thesis that the ‘resilience and vigour of indigenous and post-colonial cultures is simply ...”

“... met his family there, while my eight-year-old daughter was marvelling at his masterpiece, Snow White and the Seven Dwarves. It seems strange that an artist such as Jeff Koons can include a gigantic puppy dog in his repertoire, to massive acclaim, while Sandaldjian’s minute Disney figures are admired only by a tiny group of cognoscenti. After all, as ...”

“... was about a tragic love affair between a Moroccan from one of the dish cities and a rich white girl from the hockey suburbs. Buruma writes about it at length, making it plain that Van Gogh wasn’t a racist and that his sympathies lay with the two young lovers. For Van Gogh, the enemy was the establishment, not the other race or creed. Fortuyn, his ...”

“... of low expectations’. ‘Bush’s conversational storytelling makes for engaging reading,’ Peter Baker writes in the New York Times. ‘It’s folksy, sharply observed and surprisingly affecting,’ Michiko Kakutani says in the same paper. ‘A helluva good read,’ Douglas Brinkley writes in the Financial Times. ‘Bush Jr’s new memoir doesn’t ...”

“... devising new types of midway meeting between man and machine is at a premium in Turner’s work. Peter Corrigan, whose mission in the jungles of New Guinea forms the backbone of the narrative, actually is a camera: that is to say, he has only to look at a scene in order to register it, and subcutaneous circuits enable him to store his footage with maximum ...”

“... chair’. Clark noted that Beardsley’s work showed Munch ‘how simplified areas of black and white can work on the emotions’ and that Picasso, who had seen Beardsley’s prints in the Barcelona art journal Joventut, ‘made good use of Beardsley’s pure outlines’. I half-expected him to go on and make the obvious connection with Guernica, the great ...”

“... who in a Stanley Fishy way has simply asserted his right to authenticate? Floreat emptor. Or as Peter Carey ends his new novel, ‘How do you know how much to pay if you don’t know what it’s worth?’ Theft: A Love Story, is about just such issues of authenticity and fraudulence in the international art world. As he did in his last novel, My Life as a ...”