“... 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 ...”

“... the wounded in hospitals. Sometimes it was too much for him. ‘Suddenly, he whipped out a large white handkerchief and burst into tears. He looked around and said, “Goddammit, if I had been a better general most of you would not be here.” He turned on his heel and walked rapidly out of the door with the crowd of officials scrambling after him. The men ...”

“... parting sinews And he looks up with relief, laying it on the scales. He is a rosy young man with white eyelashes Like a bullock. He always serves me now. I think he knows about my life. How we prefer To eat in when it’s cold. How someone With a foreign accent can only cook veal. He writes the price on the grease-proof packet And hands it to me ...”

“... in deference to this illustrious guest, the pig was trussed up in breeches, a waistcoat and ‘white gloves’, before being garrotted by the ‘master of high works’. The church at Falaise, including the fresco, was whitewashed in 1820, but the tale of the luckless swine has been preserved in Edward Payson Evans’s history of the criminal prosecution ...”

“... had a good time up there,’ and the waitress’s shift is about to end. When asked at a White House dinner what he’d done to be invited, Miles Davis supposedly said: ‘Well, I’ve changed music five or six times.’ I don’t know exactly how many times John Ashbery has changed poetry, but it’s enough to earn him the right to spin his wheels a ...”

“... culture. Or perhaps they are a red-state art form: patriotic, sentimental, hopelessly unhip and white, full of small-town values, at home in suburban high schools. Unlike jazz and film, which gained respectability as pop and TV supplanted their popularity, the musical holds its own lonely place in culture; it doesn’t quite belong to anyone. Raymond Knapp ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... The continuing American blindness to Vietnam itself, in this and many other instances, notably Michael Cimino’s film The Deer Hunter (1978), can be astonishing, but the myth also shows some genuine self-understanding. Apocalypse Now, in particular, is full of the sense that Americans exported whole chunks of their culture to Vietnam and discovered its ...”

“... Lodge and Tom Sharpe. But in any wider competition for the post of English humorist-in-residence, Michael Frayn would surely be a prime contender. Now verging on sixty, his collected plays and translations fill three thick volumes, his early newspaper columns for the Guardian and the Observer have been reprinted, and he is well launched into the second phase ...”

“... cheffed [stabbed] for nobody!’ – but was increasingly worried about his older half-brother, Michael, who had ‘been moving a bit mad recently’. Carl went to a community centre in Loughborough Junction where Thapar volunteered; he started getting into trouble after his father walked out, and was later expelled from school.As boys in these ...”

“... sky, mean freedom. Emotionally, ‘Rocky Acres’ anticipates the attitude familiar from ‘The White Goddess’, who is also to be found on top of a mountain, ‘at the volcano’s head,/Among pack ice’, where         we are gifted, even in November Rawest of seasons, with so huge a sense Of her nakedly worn magnificence We forget cruelty and ...”

“... the case, a step that could have led to disciplinary measures. The final decision on this fell to Michael Hayden, the CIA director at the time. He chose not to. ‘It was a pretty easy call,’ he writes in Playing to the Edge, his new memoir. He doesn’t describe el-Masri as ‘innocent’, noting his ‘clouded past’, but does admit he was a ‘false ...”

“... a self-disciplined and abstemious diner with an enthusiasm, years ahead of his time, for light white wines and salad. (His headquarters in Utrecht now house a passable restaurant.) This influential tract, which remained in circulation as late as the mid-17th century owing to its perceived application to the doings of subsequent favourites (as Perry’s ...”

“... refusing to lose sight of the complexity of her own perspective as the daughter of a working-class white Englishman. In the essay ‘Speaking in Tongues’ from her first collection, she wrote powerfully about the ‘horror of the middling spot … this dread of the interim place! It extends through the spectre of the tragic mulatto, to the plight of the ...”