“... of storytelling in this novel has to do with the death of a dog. Three characters are involved: Michael Luxton, a taciturn dairy farmer; Jack, his elder son, aged 26; and Tom, his much younger son, approaching his 18th birthday. The old sick dog, named Luke, was originally just a farm dog, then for many years Jack’s close companion, but now more recently ...”

“... rescued through the efforts of missionaries, who transformed them into ‘Children of the Great White Queen’.Though I didn’t know it then, H.E. Marshall’s tropes of Māori savagery echoed the descriptions of the ‘land of Ire’ in 16th and 17th-century English propaganda. The Irish were ‘savage’, ‘irregular and wild’, ‘little better than ...”

“... book about difficulty of access, about a public figure withholding himself, about compromise (the white of Tottenham for the ‘peculiar blue vest’ of Lazio). Hamilton is even able to reveal that ‘Gazza is a poet!’ The themes adumbrated above are all present in Walking Possession. It is an oddly but appropriately over-organised and compartmentalised ...”

“... had a huge sign saying ‘BEWARE OF THE BULL!’ He ignored it, came face to face with a large white bull (which appears to have resembled the Devil), panicked and ran. In flight, he fell, twisted his left leg, and had considerable difficulty getting himself back down the mountain. Fortunately, a night in the open was avoided when two passing Norwegians ...”

“... the Wild West’, Dylan’s Christian conversion, and his appearance as ‘Jewish Amerindian and White Negro’. It is all a bit too much, but at least Mellers takes care, unlike Jonathan Cott in his expensive, over-reverential tome: one more coffee-table book. It may seem a bit Dylanesque (i.e. slightly cruel) but I finished Cott’s book without being able ...”

“... Of course an individual woman might prefer to have her name remembered, but if you are after the White Goddess you can’t always pause for such things. And the most lyrical lines in Sunstone bring out a ‘we’ that unmistakably speaks for women and men: ¿la vida, cuándo fue de veras nuestra? ¿cuándo somos de veras lo que somos? when was life ever ...”

“... was sexually demanding’. Claims of this sort may have a place in fiction, however: Mr de Vere White’s entertaining new novel, Johnnie Cross, is about George Eliot’s ‘strong passions’, and the correspondingly weak ones of the man she married at the end of her life. Mr Williams finds it ‘extraordinary that Lewes didn’t find the time to sit down ...”

“... in the supermarket, the bloom on blueberries, the clamshell under the rake, the nylon of her white bathing dress drying on the deck, the flake of paint and creosote, the cool air on my legs as I jumped up in my shorts in the morning, the hot granite rip-rap and the icy sea, the yellow warblers flickering through the ...”

“... the role of Bryan and the director kept saying: ‘More pompous, Morone. Make him more pompous.’ Michael Kazin is a fine historian who specialises in the lost causes of the left. He has written sympathetic books on the Populist movement and the 1960s. In A Godly Hero, his life of Bryan, he now draws an unexpected conclusion: defying capitalists and defending ...”

“... She stirs up ghosts and has no hand in laying them to rest. The centre wall of samplers deploys white figures cut from black paper: the subjects are all absences. This frieze, The Sovereign Citizens’ Sesquicentennial Civil War Celebration, brings the story from the plantation into the present, even though the cast of characters look unchangingly ...”

“... side, the eighteen-wheeler that destroyed the car, and from a ditch on the side of the highway a white plastic bag floating up out of the grass where the worms are working slow and blind beneath the ants that march in their single columns of grace like soldiers before they’re shipped out, before war makes them human again and scatters them across the ...”

“... UK on Sky Atlantic, was nominated for five Emmys and made much of by everyone from Lorrie Moore to Michael Bloomberg. Before this, 26-year-old Dunham had made short films, web comedy series and two movies – the best and best-known thing she’s done so far is the movie Tiny Furniture – in which she also plays women her own age, slouching towards adulthood ...”

“... beyond the limits of permissible displeasure. And so, in his own way, does the Austrian filmmaker Michael Haneke. Funny Games (1997) is a violent melodrama about a respectable family set upon by nasty criminals, much as in The Desperate Hours (1955) or Cape Fear (1962). (Both films were remade in the 1990s, by ...”

“... which many of the people we think of as black do not, and some of the people we think of as white do. So, too, the relevant genetic information about a person is individual and familial, not racial. A person’s height, for example is determined mainly by the height of his or her actual ancestors, partly by environmental factors and not at all by the ...”

“... This month​ marks the fiftieth anniversary of the Woodstock festival. Michael Lang, the tenacious 24-year-old who made Woodstock happen, has a habit of surfacing at Woodstock birthdays: one book to mark the tenth anniversary, another to mark the fortieth, a couple of namesake concerts and now a coffee-table volume of photos from the 1969 festival, plus brief explanatory notes ...”