“... US government – and the immensely detailed coverage of events which that length implies, The White House Years is hard to lay aside. This quality of readability will come as a surprise to those who have tackled the turgid prose of some of Dr Kissinger’s earlier works, which combined the worst excesses of the American academic style with an uncertain ...”

“... of art, it is through a crucial strategic discovery that changes the rules: the prototype is William Webb Ellis of Rugby School, who playing football one afternoon picked up the ball and ran with it. A fox of genius surprises again and again by the speed and wonder of his inventiveness. These speculations have come in the wake of seeing an exhibition at ...”

“... sugar lobbyists received a sympathetic hearing from the director of the Office of Global Affairs, William Steiger, a godson of the first President Bush. ‘Sound science’, abetted by the Data Quality Act, was his bludgeon of choice in attacking the report, even though researchers in his own department had participated in its preparation and endorsed it as a ...”

“... William Joyce, ‘Lord Haw-Haw’, recorded his last ever broadcast from the temporary offices of the German Radio Corporation, in Hamburg, on the day Hitler shot himself. British troops were on the point of entering the city and Joyce and his colleagues had raided the cellars of the Funkhaus, drinking everything they could find ...”

“... nor was there any mention of the two actors, the American Edwin Forrest and the Englishman William Charles Macready, whose long-smouldering rivalry as to whose was the greatest Macbeth of the age had culminated in clashes between a 15,000-strong mob and a detachment of the National Guard. Nowadays the neighbourhood hardly looks like the front line in ...”

“... narrator’s tone remains, in keeping with his personality, resolutely Apollonian. The novel is William Beckwith’s account of summer 1983, during which he was ‘riding high on sex and self-esteem – it was my time, my grande époque.’ Will is 25, from a recently aristocratic family (his grandfather was ennobled for his services as Director of Public ...”

“... himself: ‘It is 74 degrees.’ Does his belief amount to knowledge? A woman whose body is snow white grows up in a black and white room, reading book after book about the physics and psychology of colour perception. On the day she finally leaves the room, she sees a ripe tomato and is stunned. Has she learned something ...”

“... The pure products​ of America go crazy, William Carlos Williams wrote, but he was only half right: America’s crazy, and so sometimes its pure products go sane. Consider the eponymous narrator of Paul Beatty’s novel The Sellout. When we first meet him, in the Supreme Court’s ‘cavernous chambers’, the sellout’s hands are cuffed behind his back ...”

“... swarm of Lancastrian soldiers. He falls, then writhes and jerks in painful spasms, each marked in William Walton’s score by a dissonant chord. Then he collapses, his sword arm slack. All this – first blow to final breath – takes fifty seconds, no more. Frink was transfixed. Without Olivier and Walton, I don’t think I would have seen the full ...”

“... were in part a response to heavy-handed policing in Asian areas. At the same time, resentment in white communities over the putative special treatment given to Asian areas was stoked by government regeneration schemes that required places to compete for funds, and thus, as Herman Ouseley’s report on Bradford put it, to demonstrate that ‘your area is more ...”

“... the genuine Hebrew Cabalist might be shocked by Agrippa’s interpretation of Cabala solely as white magic, yet this interpretation served a purpose in fortifying man for intellectual and spiritual endeavour.’ It ‘fortified’ him by giving insurance against being caught by devils and sent to Hell; she has just explained that, and no doubt a real ...”

“... gazed. Inshore and farther out the mirror of water whitened, spurned by lightshod hurrying feet. White breast of the dim sea ...’ Kenner says that Stephen is merely ‘trying out phrases, outdoing Yeats’, or perhaps imitating Homer (Starchamber Quiry, p. 26): but Kenner is the one who has no eyes here. Joyce often expresses fascination at the incessant ...”

“... with a large borrowed Philips camera, but he too began using the smaller and simpler Sony in 1970. William Eggleston bought two, stuck fancier lenses on them, and documented the Memphis demi-monde for his film Stranded in Canton. Jonas, who at this point had worked mostly in performance and made one short film, realised that the combination of camera, monitor ...”

“... to if not an anticipatory parody of Gone with the Wind, which appeared a year later. Directed by William Wyler, and displaying Davis in what already seems to be her late style, the film is set in New Orleans in 1852: two years after Balzac’s death and full of American instances of his preoccupations. And devoted, even more than Balzac is, to the ...”

“... and goings. They peck at the fruit. A pair of wood pigeons – soft grey backs, pink-buff breasts, white collars – land and cling unsteadily to twigs too fragile for their weight. They almost fall as they reach for cherries which they swallow whole. It is late on a warm afternoon. We watch the birds. The titles Howard Hodgkin gives his pictures – In a Hot ...”