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“... and geologists use in the field. One magnifies by 10, the other by 20. The mites, glistening white blobs, could be seen moving slowly across the grey crust. I hope, but do not expect, to have recruited at least one of the girls to the pleasures of low magnification. Since I was a child I have hankered after optical instruments. The first was a 5x ...”

“... the black borders of the US. Jaune Quick-To-See Smith’s crafty layering in Fifty Shades of White echoes the creation of this elaborate fiction, a fiction that continues to exercise an extraordinary, destructive power. I am reminded of the first maps I saw as a child, hanging on the walls of British classrooms. Of course, the colour that occurred most ...”

“... Arabia, I lived in a city policed by gossip and run by rumour. While its citizens, flapping in white robes and black veils and wrappings, glided through the streets like formal ghosts, its guest-workers crept through their contracts, guided by intuitions as evanescent and mysterious as those of spiritualists. Perplexing questions hung in the still ...”

“... botany and worried constantly about her workload, complaining that she has ‘to keep on like the White Queen to stay in the same place’. When she got a B- in her first English paper, it made her feel ‘slightly sick’. She dated with the fervour of a boy-crazy 18-year-old. ‘Oh dear will a nice freshman boy never give me a tumble?’ she sighed in a ...”

“... church. A mile or so beyond looms a larger sight that Rodinsky was spared: the 52 floors of Richard Seifert’s Natwest Tower, double-decker lifts, automatic window-washing facilities and all. Here again was the characteristic frisson of the zone of transition, where different worlds rub up against one another, languages intersect on every corner and ...”

“... of appearances’. In 18th-century France, a plain black coat, waistcoat and breeches, with white silk stockings, was the distinctive dress of the middle-class male professional – middle-class women were more colourful. Noblemen had the privilege of wearing a sword, and could dress their servants richly in livery embroidered with their coat of ...”

“... its eyes in a familiar world that it had never known ... The water was deep, but she lifted her white body and reached out with a long, sweeping stroke. The touch of the sea is sensuous, enfolding the body in its soft, close embrace.’ Edna’s eroticism, and her choice of suicide rather than the bondage of domestic roles, raised feminist issues that ...”

“... the vexatious demand that a ceasefire should involve the ceasing of fire.As early as March, the White House was said to have ‘lost its patience’ with Israel’s intransigence. Yet enough patience was left for it to be running out again in June, and in August. In May, a ‘source close to the White House’ noted that ...”

“... placed for shoulder. These lines and shapes precipitate a face, itself un-outlined, from out of white space, the unmistakable head of Harpo Marx. Turn a few more pages of Wendy Wick Reaves’s spectacular book Celebrity Caricature in America, the catalogue for an exhibition at the Smithsonian in Washington DC until 23 August, and you will also learn ...”

“... fact that neither of the other major parties to the Ulster conflict shares that anxiety. But the White Paper, Northern Ireland: A Framework for Devolution, pitches the issue intelligently in speaking of the ‘responsibility’, rather than the ‘right’, of the Northern Ireland people to run their own affairs. In offering a mechanism for progressive ...”

“... Life of LBJ reminds one, is something else again. Whereas British political biography, with the (white) elephantine exception of Martin Gilbert’s Churchill is, almost as a matter of professional pride, a one-volume affair, there is a well established American tradition of monumentalism, based, it seems, on the assumption that a blockbusting person requires ...”

“... gorgeous 13th-century mosaic Cosmati pavement in front of the high altar, and the portrait of Richard II, the abbey’s other profligate royal patron. It hangs almost unnoticed off a pier just by the West Door, the first contemporaneous likeness of an English king, and a rare instance of 14th-century northern European portraiture. The abbey, as much a ...”

“... touch his face for the last time, but the casket and its window had been sealed shut. On it lay a white flower, a single cut stem placed on the coffin’s wood by the undertaker. There was nothing unusual about it. But to Ayane it was extraordinary. Ten days earlier, at the height of her hope and despair, in an effort to escape her anxiety, Ayane had gone to ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... foreground whom at first we barely notice: a typical Poussin figure, half-asleep on the ground, white-haired and a little overweight: as if death, if we’re lucky, will be a long weary half-consciousness of water still flowing (the figure is a river god holding a jar whose contents spill through his fingers) and a shelf of grass. Death is everywhere at ...”