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“... There is a Shakespeare-spouting polyglot: the Thembu manservant April, whose black features wear a white mask contrived by Quinn and mutilated by Breedt. There is Breedt’s wife, fresh from a Boer War concentration camp and challenged by April’s rebellious son. And as each chases the other round and round, like figures in some moonstruck nursery rhyme or ...”

“... one of the most effective, is about a troop of black Brownies (irony intended) who encounter a white troop at camp. The white girls emerge from the bus clutching Disney or pseudo-Disney sleeping bags and ‘stuffed toys like pacifiers’, comfort objects for which the black girls are already far too ...”

“... journalists, many of whom are women nowadays, are quite as likely to ask for a Perrier water or a white wine and soda as to order a large scotch or a pint of bitter. In some respects, this is no less important a change in the ambience of our trade than the new technology and the mass migration from Fleet Street. Moreover, the combination of these factors has ...”

“... But there is, apparently, more competition for the honour than up the road at Bertorelli’s. Michael Foot passes by and nods, albeit ‘briefly’. Marcia Williams sweeps in: expect no nods from her. She comes under the novelist’s scalpel: ‘She’s an attractive woman, her face has a good bone structure, but there’s something curiously unreal about ...”

“... is doomed. Whatever else the novel does, it doesn’t show the lesbian life as recommendable. Michael Baker has taken on the task of relating The Well to John’s own life. ‘It is arguable,’ he writes, ‘that had John drawn more on her own personal knowledge, a better novel would have resulted.’ But she would have had, of course, to romanticise ...”

“... this speech after reading the opening chapters of a novel by the protagonist of What a Carve Up!, Michael Owen (not the footballer). Michael, the author of Accidents Will Happen and The Loving Touch, is too experienced to be more than mildly affronted when a student finds his work insufficiently radical, but if his books ...”

“... Logic’s necessity is more profound. It’s impossible for a contradiction like ‘Snow is white and snow is not white’ to be true, and this necessity seems absolute. ‘Laws of logic’ don’t function like laws of nature, keeping reality in line, since if they did we could ask why those laws could not be ...”

“... All that marble, all that gilt, all the crystal, made me long, deeply long, for a simple white Episcopalian church in New England.’ ‘I don’t for a moment believe you.’ ‘But I mean it. I realised it’s been coming for a long while, this reconversion.’ He tried not to smile, but he couldn’t help himself and did, a little. She smiled as ...”

“... Grievance and 2ND Poems, seemed to mark him out as an oddity who could easily be ignored. The White Threshold in 1949 and The Nightfishing in 1955 made a conscious break with his earliest work, but just at the point at which he began to win recognition, he appeared to give up writing. Though he continued to publish in little magazines throughout the ...”

“... source Where the decked chestnut had lost its place In our front hedge above the wallflowers. The white chips jumped and jumped and skited high. I heard the hatchet’s differentiated Accurate cut, the crack, the sigh And collapse of what luxuriated Through the shocked tips and wreckage of it all. Deep planted and long gone, my coeval Chestnut from a jam ...”

“... Russian from the only available textbook, Stalin’s Studies in Leninism. Soon he is wearing the white shirt and red scarf of the Pioneers. The deportations begin: Kapuściński’s father, an officer in the defeated Polish Army, takes to the woods, disguised as a peasant. His mother spends the nights standing at the window, waiting for the NKVD to ...”

“... time. ‘I only caught a glimpse of him,’ a woman says of a former high-ranking Nazi: ‘white-haired, distinguished, lots of Old World charm, like most surviving murderers.’ The novel was published in Germany in 1985, the year of Böll’s death, and is set in the present, when Cuba and Nicaragua fill the dreams of the European young. Some of the ...”

“... broad enough to include Charles Masterman, Arthur Ponsonby, Father Bernard Vaughan and Arnold White cannot be dismissed out of hand. It would be implausible to suggest that this relaxation in the moral climate had absolutely no effect on politics. Churchill had the imminent prospect of office when late in 1905 he allowed Cassel to furnish the sitting-room ...”

“... as Mrs Castle’s inability to distinguish between wood and trees came with the publication of the White Paper ‘In Place of Strife’ in January 1969. Moved on from Transport to the newly-created Department of Employment and Productivity (but essentially the old Ministry of Labour) in April 1968, she soon became convinced that something had to be done about ...”

“... and expository ends: ‘And now the shadow cast by the cabbage tree at the centre of the white courtyard with the green border must be longer at noon but nobody measures it because it is the late summer that always settles into the hottest and driest weather.’ There is pleasure, too, in the erotic hunts and their culminations, handled with an ...”