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“... of the Florentine nation or even identify the figure. For the abbé, it was ‘a great phantasm of white marble, well worked and all of one piece’ (‘ung grand fantosme de marbre blanc, bien ouvre et tout dune piece’). Fantosme can be translated as ‘ghost’, though the word left it unclear whether the apparition existed in the world or in the ...”

“... Judith Richardson begins Possessions by quoting a 1933 guidebook to the Hudson Valley: ‘How comes the Hudson to this unique heritage of myth, ghosts, goblins and other lore?’ By the end of her exhaustive chronicle of local history and legend the answer is self-evident: ‘Why is the Hudson Valley haunted? Perhaps a better question after all is: how on earth could it not be?’ Until I read this book, the Hudson Valley seemed remote from anguished, obviously possessed sites like ravaged towns in Mississippi and throughout the Deep South, the battlefield at Gettysburg, Hollywood or even the foggy menace of Seattle ...”

“... been more precise) where Miss Manners, who was really a correspondent for the Washington Post, Judith Perlman Martin, had once read English. But as a rough contemporary (class of ’57) of Ms Martin’s (class of ’59), I can confirm that even those of us who were not born to polite WASP society could not have managed to leave Wellesley’s ...”

“... was asked if her promotion had been inspired by political correctness. For some academics, mainly white men, a black woman making history during Black History Month – October – was not a happy coincidence but a conspiracy. (At Bath Spa, all applications for professorships are submitted in the spring, and all results announced in October.) The Royal ...”

“... Feeling, the queer theorist Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick describes its strange and haunting black and white cover photograph as ‘the catalyst that impelled me to assemble the book in its present form’. It depicts a woman clumsily embracing an object that resembles an enormous wasps’ nest made of sticks and twine. The woman’s eyes are shut, and her face is ...”

“... To explain why Judith Binney – who died in New Zealand in February – is a major figure in contemporary historiography it is necessary to explain why the history of her country has become a field of which contemporary historians do well to take notice. They have not always done so. New Zealand has been considered a safe, dull Anglo-democracy, with a welfare state 75 years old and reasonable race relations, small and remote enough – even in times of world war – to be dismissed as happy in having no history; none at least, to which historians need bother to attend ...”

“... where his artisan father practised his trade as a glover and ‘whittawer’ – a worker of white leather, typically kidskin, and thus a producer of those ‘kid gloves’ still proverbial for their softness. The product was upmarket but the production of it messy and pungent. When Shakespeare mentions a man with a ‘great round beard, like a ...”

“... invisible. And it was during this decade that the labour question was asked for the last time. As Judith Stein observes in Pivotal Decade, the 1970s was the only decade except for the 1930s during which Americans grew poorer. By the late 1960s, around a quarter of all new investment by US companies in electrical and non-electrical machinery, transportation ...”

“... obituaries of dead children – he rose to heaven, he joined the angels – and their tragic white coffins; baroque mouldings; excrescences carved in granite on the vulgar façades of banks; coat and hat racks made with the horns and hooves of deer or mountain goats; coats of arms for common last names made of glazed ceramic from Talavera. The cadences ...”

“... prosperous land agent in Warwickshire. But Mary Anne sounds rather like a servant’s name (the White Rabbit’s housemaid is called Mary Ann). As the rising fortunes of the family gave her a lady’s education, she began to experiment and adapt – trying out Marianne, losing the final ‘e’, and later settling on Marian. Throughout her life, she ...”

“... pressing on ‘through clouds of mosquitoes which settled on his face’. Night comes, a ‘white arctic night’ that ‘wiped away the shadows’. Then, in the dawn, he speaks, and ‘all nature quaked.’ Each animal ‘answered Ivan’s words with its own call’. When Ivan speaks, he can give real names to ‘the black fish hidden in the mud of the ...”

“... to be both a Zionist and an anti-Semite. Evidence of this is supplied by the statements of white supremacists in the US and extreme right-wing politicians across Europe. Richard Spencer, a leading figure in the American alt-right, has no trouble characterising himself as a ‘white Zionist’ (‘As an Israeli ...”

“... reluctantly and partially. By the same token, if you want only the bad news you turn to, say, Judith Cook and Red Alert, with its unambiguous subtitle, ‘The Worldwide Dangers of Nuclear Power’. Turn to her we shall, in due course: and the news is indeed bad, though perhaps not quite what she intends. ‘Pro-nuclear’ and ‘anti-nuclear’ are ...”

“... and puffy silk. Of my fellow spectators on a Thursday morning, pretty well all are female and white and upper-bourgeois-looking, and many have come in pairs: mothers and daughters of various ages, old chums up in town on a day-trip, elderly ladies out with a relative or friend. There’s a strange mood, sad and gentle and full of longing: ‘Mother ...”

“... face with its boldly painted lights on the knotted brow and the exclamatory strokes of white in his grey beard. The whole figure seems to be locked perspectivally into his cell full of books, which we understand as the furniture of his mind.You next encounter a queue in front of something resembling a garden shed made of rough wooden planks – the ...”