“... and a changing spectrum. When Sycorax sees, and when Ariel is later seduced by, the first of the white colonists, their sensuous reactions are fully spontaneous and uninhibited. In the 20th century, Miranda like the rest of Sir Kit’s descendants has a ‘touch of the tarbrush’, of which she is very conscious; moreover, she has the trained eye of a ...”

“... Lodovico’s eerie expression of satisfaction as he contemplates the slaughter at the end of The White Devil: ‘I limned this night piece and it was my best.’ The idea that each person carried death around from birth as a sort of travelling companion, an uncanny, dogging ‘double’, blossoms on the stage into the horrific spectre of the ‘thing, armed ...”

“... has proclaimed a permanent state of war, and had that claim taken seriously by the citizens. Christopher Hitchens has jeeringly said that many American leftists are more afraid of John Ashcroft than they are of Osama bin Laden. I am exactly the sort of person Hitchens has in mind. Ever since the White House rammed the ...”

“... for 1996, then 1998, then spring, summer, autumn and now late December 1999. An interesting white-knuckle ride for the politicians. The line has soaked up, so far, around £3.3 billion, but its apologists (cursing critics as spoil-sports) speak airily of how all major construction projects come in a whisker over budget. Look at the Channel Tunnel, the ...”

“... that I could need £100. I’d go down there and he still wouldn’t pay me, and yet he’d have a white Rolls Royce with a chauffeur sitting outside waiting to take him wherever he wanted to go. But who says he paid the chauffeur? Not settling debts is hardly unheard of in Old Etonians. But Robert was a first-generation Etonian, and might conceivably have ...”

“... appearing as a peevish young icon slouched on a chair with a moody, come-hither expression, a pure white cat on his lap and his bare feet submerged in the pile of a white rug in Mr and Mrs Clark and Percy, the portrait by David Hockney that aspired to Gainsborough as a take on the aristocracy of London, c.1971, but owed more ...”

“... as a form of philosophical discourse but from the idea (best exemplified in the work of Hayden White) that as a story, or something contrived, history is not all that different from stories which make no claim to ‘truth’. ‘Dear reader,’ he wrote in a typically self-conscious style (and here I paraphrase), the story I am about to tell differs from ...”

“... sent the young author a three-page analysis of The Jungle and an invitation to visit him at the White House for further discussion. These events led directly to the passing of the Federal Meat Inspection Act and the Pure Food and Drug Act (although not, to Sinclair’s chagrin, to the drafting of new legislation promoting workers’ rights. ‘I aimed for ...”

“... was made from the Quarry Wood wall. Sure enough, another slide showed the boulders chipped bone-white and crushed into a foundation. Growing up in Cults, I felt the presence of this past – walls, cairns, excavations – almost like the imprint of flagstones under linoleum. As Shepherd put it in The Quarry Wood, ‘the stones summed up existence.’ My ...”

“... performance, the long-breath rant with its doomsday imagery, its wild repetitions in the mode of Christopher Smart’s Jubilate Agno, persuaded Ferlinghetti to send a telegram paraphrasing the note from Emerson to Whitman from the appendix to Leaves of Grass. ‘I GREET YOU AT THE BEGINNING OF A GREAT CAREER. WHEN DO I GET MANUSCrIPT OF “HOWL”?’ Howl ...”

“... it in January, it was overrun by brambles; much of its balustrading had been kicked away; its four white marble columns had long since been heaved off (the nearby railway line their likely destination); and the temporary metal fence surrounding it was more of an eyesore than a protection. Soane designed the monument in 1816, originally as a memorial to his ...”

“... displays from its stone amphitheatre. There were also beauty contests, with girls in bikinis and white stilettos parading in front of men in suits and their wives in fake pearls and cat eye sunglasses.At night, the bustle switched to the town centre. The Picture House, known as the bug hut, was built in the silver screen rush of the 1920s and offered cheap ...”

“... the first morning had a giddy, almost nervous energy. It was overwhelmingly, if not exclusively, white. The biggest constituency, men in jeans and T-shirts, wouldn’t have looked out of place at one of the rock concerts advertised on the NEC’s hoardings.Inside the main hall, the queue for the bar was already twenty people deep at 10.30 a.m. Senior ...”

“... Marilyn Butler’s Romantics, Rebels and Reactionaries, reviewed in the LRB (Vol. 3, No 21) by Christopher Ricks; and Thomas McFarland’s marvellously over-the-top Romanticism and the Forms of Ruin, which also appeared in 1981. (One might commend, en passant, the Princeton University Press as a place where inventive, wordy studies in Romantic ideas ...”

“... the gnawing anxiety about his standing one has to remember that he began as the whitest of British white hopes. Being the youngest undergraduate at Oxford for centuries (though he did not stay the course) was less significant than creating the score for the Sitwellian Façade at 19. It would take several decades for this masterpiece to achieve its final form ...”