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“... is what Spiegelman means when he says it’s ‘a perfect picture of its time’: a time when nice white folks felt safe enough to play at risk, and when vice was easily defined and therefore (if you were a liberal) easily romanticised. March’s thoughts, in his memoir, about the sensibility of young poets, make clear how much romanticising was going on ...”

“... up like soldiers on parade, decorated with union flags and bunting, the curbstones painted red, white and blue – a suspected UDA informer had been done to death a few months earlier. His killers had stretched him out on the floor in a back room and then dropped a concrete building-block on his head over and over again. It sounds like a black joke: ‘Your ...”

“... had flown into a fence in a snowstorm, clipped his wing and hobbled into the farmyard. He wore his white speckled plumage like a wounded warrior’s greatcoat and his fierce yellow eyes in the corner of the shed seemed to burn a hole in the dark. When we went out for a walk before bed, the temperature was 35 degrees below zero. The sky was clear and blue in ...”

“... of the Russian state. The émigrés who supported Kolchak, Denikin, Wrangel and the other White generals never forgave him. Lenin kept him on in Paris in the Twenties buying weapons and then negotiating the repayment of the original loan agreement made with Joffre. In 1932 he was invited home, and, exiled from the émigré community in Paris ...”

“... is sufficiently good-humoured and various to accommodate a pleasingly disgusting horror story, ‘White Lies’, and a disarming comedy, ‘Algebra’, about a gentle homosexual who, to his own surprise, takes literary London by storm simply through flattering famous writers and inviting them round for little social evenings. If Theroux has a weakness, it is ...”

“... the third in a group he calls the LA Quartet. The others are The Black Dahlia, The Big Nowhere and White Jazz. The plot of the novel has been compressed and slightly switched for the film, bits of dialogue and the occasional death being reallocated. In both versions a Christmas party at an LAPD station-house gets out of hand, some Mexican prisoners are beaten ...”

“... and synthesised, could have important medical applications. As we arrived, an Arctic fox, snow-white and no bigger than a cat, scampered behind a small ridge. In previous years, the fox would not have been stranded, apparently without food, because first-year ice would already have formed across the surface of the ocean. With the ice disappearing, the ...”

“... a couple of portraits, three gorgeous paintings of Quappi (Vaudeville Act, Quappi with White Fur and Quappi in Grey), some of Beckmann’s typical (and very unusual) scenic or group pictures, a triptych, a few landscapes and still-lifes. Even in the minority of pictures where there are no human figures, there is grandeur and theatricality: in ...”

“... between the end of Reconstruction and the 1960s, often for such crimes as daring to look at a white woman. Black bodies no longer swing in the Southern breeze, as Billie Holiday sang. Instead, they are victims of chokeholds, bullets and other ‘restraining’ measures inflicted by the police, and not only below the Mason-Dixon line. Police killings of ...”

“... or underdrawn his characters, McCourt’s books and manner are engaging. The historian Richard White describes his book as an ‘anti-memoir’. White, who teaches history at Stanford, has traced the story of another post-Independence immigrant – his mother. Sarah Walsh emigrated to the United States from County Kerry ...”

“... so impatiently, almost neurotically declarative. And then the typography: Fuegi’s name in white, in a round, solid typeface, the title by contrast in jagged, dripping Kung Fu characters, the first five words in white, but ‘Bertolt’ and ‘Brecht’, bigger and finally enormous, and red! That in conjunction with ...”

“... tuna rather than go out and get soaked all over again. Thoughts of the delicious, large, grilled white fish and great rounds of flat hot bread in the restaurant at the other side of the quarter are so tempting, but not if it means braving this deluge. No wonder the three old men who do everyone’s laundry in their sunken little space round the corner ...”

“... as posing for the rapist in what Dorothy van Ghent calls her ‘miraculously dirt-resistant white garments’ – she has been raped by this time anyway. But she is being posed by Richardson in a passage like the following, and someone’s fantasies are being indulged. The marquis is not far away.    Her dress was ...”

“... up our stories and in terms of feeling really bad about it afterwards. This new memoir from Michael Finkel streaks across a firmament already glittering with apologetic precedents. Stephen Glass, once a popular and ambitious young thing at the New Republic, invented email addresses and whole companies to hide his deceit, and later went on to invent a ...”

“... up. I wonder if the citizens of Baghdad ever feel that way. The day before the first shooting, the White House Press Secretary, Ari Fleischer, proposed a ‘one-bullet’ scenario for getting rid of Saddam Hussein. In Washington, one bullet was too many. This was the sniper’s time, and his alone. Only he had anything to show for it. And part of what he had ...”