“... 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 ...”

“... the Graduate Institute of International Studies invited Mises to teach in Geneva. Its founder, William Rappard, the director of the Mandate Section of the League, described the institute as a diplomatic training ground for a transatlantic elite, and himself secured $100,000 from the Rockefellers. It became an academic hub for the most globally minded ...”

“... of his subjects. If mystics can do so much with repetition and the word and, then why can’t we? William James speaks of that ‘vertigo of self-contradiction which is so dear to mysticism’. Some people can do cartwheels and other people have to do that thing where they put down their hands and then kind of hop off the ground. This feels more like the ...”

“... travelled to the Rajmahal Hills in February 1837 on a ‘tiger-shooting trip’ with her nephew William Osborne, 260 camp followers (‘We find we have 260 people altogether in the camp – half our followers bring their followers’) and 20 elephants. Later, she accompanied (with 12,000 others) her brother, the Governor-General, to the court of the last ...”

“... they look like? Like a brown and purple cloud-shadow spread out across the uplands, described by William Atkins in characteristically fine focus when he says of the North Yorkshire moors that ‘the new blooms were silverish specks; they were pale grey, beige and mint green. I picked a sprig, but the moor-purple visible from a distance was not a colour you ...”

“... the noise was coming from and switched it on for a second. In the brief flare of light he saw two white faces turn and look up from a trench-sap dug deep under the base of the tomb. He saw a man with a black moustache and a very fair young boy’s face and the turning spindle of a roll of telephone wire being unwound – squeaking quietly. There’s a sure ...”

“... hubbub ... The Hunter-Indian; Moors Malays, Lascars, the Tartar, the Chinese And Negro Ladies in white muslin Gowns. By the 19th century, however, little mention was made of black people in the London press. Many had run away from their masters to lead anonymous, fugitive lives. Some died of poverty or went to sea; some were transported to America or, more ...”

“... When, as a boy, I first saw pictures of those Deep South nocturnalists in their crazy all-white strip, I had the notion that they had just sprung from their Alabaman slumbers, roused maybe by a sudden seizure of race-hatred, and had simply grabbed the nearest uniform that came to hand. A couple of peep-holes in the pillowcase and off we go ...”

“... like a ballroom without women. Then I remember foot and mouth and put out more viricide and straw. William Youatt, whose The Pig: A Treatise on the Breeds, Management, Feeding and Medical Treatment of Swine of 1847 is still the standard work on the British pig, prints many anecdotes of the docility, gentleness, affection, cleanliness, intelligence, even ...”

“... Godwin had decorated with an elegance that owed something to Whistler … I remember vaguely a white drawing-room with Whistler etchings, ‘let in’ to white panels, and a dining-room all white, chairs, walls, mantelpiece, carpet, except for a diamond-shaped piece of red cloth in the ...”

“... so badly burned that he wanted nothing to do with it. When he came under strong Congressional and White House pressure to start a new Red hunt in 1930, he argued that such a thing was strictly illegal – and since the agitators were mainly in the unions, wouldn’t it be better to hand the whole thing over to the Department of Labor? The project quietly ...”

“... Banks may have as much trouble getting out from under the success of his first novel as did William Golding. It was a memorable debut. The Wasp Factory provoked a moral panic in 1984. The TLS critic called it the ‘literary equivalent of the nastiest kind of juvenile delinquency’; Margaret Forster thought it less a novel than the script for a video ...”