“... she was sent, as if to complete the gothic theme, to the same awful convent school that Antonia White attended and wrote about in Frost in May. Vicious nuns, a minimal education for middle-class marriage and – something, at least – a powerful enemy to kick against. As an adult she would spit on the street if she saw nuns. Earlier, she had a more ...”

“... qu’instable’. He is describing homosexuals, whom he calls ‘inverts’, and to Edmund White’s analysis of this passage in The Proust Project – White sees Proust’s writing on homosexuality as both ‘venomous’ in certain of its assumptions and productive in the sheer array of its contradictions – we ...”

“... not wholly had. There would have been no ‘Recessional’ but for its members’ insistence that white men should not boast. Kipling’s most serious difficulty did not come to light during the years covered by these volumes. He depended on encountering the incidents which would one day bring his Daemon into play. Once these had been absorbed, they might lie ...”

“... a pleasant sitting-room with chintzy chairs, into another room at the back. It has a black-and-white checked floor and is full of easels. At each easel there is an old woman, wearing a smock. Some have paintbrushes in their hands and are managing to dip them occasionally into paint and splodge on the paper in front of them. Such a passage would be equally ...”

“... that go astray or are misunderstood. But for all this, Kate never ceases to be a 57-year-old white North Carolina woman, with all her limitations and prejudices, her nostalgia for a pre-consumerist America and her well-meaning but patronising attitude to blacks. In the last fifty pages, which briefly recount Kate’s adult life, the language turns blowsy ...”

“... simply sweatshops by a new name, using children to produce shoes on old sewing-machines, many are white antiseptic hives using laser technology to produce parts for such giants as Boeing Aircraft of Seattle. If this is the way of the future, it is a very different way from the supposedly inexorable de-skilling and automation of industrial labour predicted by ...”

“... a sort of switch into the tale of Beauty and the Beast, Mina kisses Dracula’s face, now a white, scaly, cracking affair, a sordid bathroom of a countenance; and then she kills him, and cuts off his head, giving him peace. The novelisation of the film reunites her with Jonathan, but the film wisely stays away from this, and closes on the painted ...”

“... to tell the truth,’ Sancho says, presumably telling the truth. ‘For one thing I’m black and white in a full-colour universe.’ And for the moment, he doesn’t seem visible to anyone except his father. Will he die if his father stops thinking about him? ‘If you get imagined into being, does that mean that after that you can just be?’ If you’re a ...”

“... Pentagon’s judge advocate generals, and based his decision instead on an analysis provided by White House counsel Alberto Gonzales, a former corporate lawyer from Texas. The suspects, who have still not been charged or granted access to counsel, remain at Guantanamo: at least 14 have attempted suicide. There is no love lost between the Defense Secretary ...”

“... deserted barns Of grey stone, among grey houses, within grey villages, But inside pink or white or painted by the sun coming through stained glass. Little Romanesque shrines with stocky frames, like craftsmen shaped by their labour, Pascal’s invisible church, sewn into canvas, And slim cathedrals like herons above the cities, seen clearly from the ...”

“... has a price. If they kidnapped me, he said, they would ask for more on the basis that I am white. ‘They wouldn’t let you go for less than fifty million.’ It may​ be hard fully to understand the attraction of a politician like Amaechi, but you only have to look at some of his opponents to see why many prefer him. Wale Ajadi, who runs a ...”

“... skin outside Gooey Jew. From the 20th century’s 24/7 chimneys, choo-choo- Train puffs of white smoke rise. The trains waddle full of cattle to the camps. The weightless puffs of smoke are on their way to the sky. Ovens cremate fields of human cow. Ovens cremate fields of human snow. One has to go back to Sylvia Plath, born just a few years before ...”

“... court of one, or one and a half – and where, mostly coincidentally, Tintoretto’s Portrait of a White-Bearded Man hangs. Atzbacher, the younger man, working on some chronic and unpublished work of philosophy, and very much in thrall to the domineering Reger (‘my imaginary father’), comes to the museum an hour early, so that he can stand next door in the ...”

“... or the harsh structures of human conflict, ‘all the versuses of life/from LEEDS v. DERBY, Black/White …/the unending violence of US and THEM’. A ‘supporter’ is a ‘poetry supporter’, as if art was a team; and ‘the life of Leeds’ is ‘supported by the dead’. However, since the graveyard being described sits above a disused coalmine, the ...”

“... where we can’t put together the bland colour images of the present with the grisly black and white pictures of the past. What on earth can it mean to say this is the same place? At another moment the narrator recalls a film made during the first year of the Occupation, a light comedy called Premier Rendez-vous. The physical film seems strange to him when ...”