“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... About ten years ago, on a previous visit to Egypt, William Golding arrived at ‘a simple truth: that Egypt is a complex country of more-or-less Arab culture and it is outrageous for the uninformed visitor to confine himself to dead Egyptians while the strange life of the valley and the desert goes on all round him ...”

“... their wealth; Protestantism was the badge of the Ascendancy. At 28 she married a neighbour, Sir William Gregory, 35 years her senior. Gregory had been at Harrow with Trollope, who, as a schoolboy, was thought grubby and generally pretty hopeless, but they remained friends, and Phineas Finn is said to be partly based on Sir ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... changed in pendulum swings. In the post-Vietnam/post-Nixon mood which brought Jimmy Carter to the White House, it swung quite a long way against interventionism, and even conservative Republicans like California’s Governor, Ronald Reagan, fulminated against the idea of America being expected to act as policeman for the world. Sickened by exposures of ...”

“... taken place in his city, he has worked diligently to uncover a piece of history obscured, in both white and Black Tulsa, by silence. Whites did not wish to be reminded of a terrible crime; Blacks talked about the massacre at home for years but perhaps feared that public discussion might trigger some kind of repetition. Ellsworth was astonished, as a ...”