“... knee breeks black silk stockings high heeled shoes with large buckles, blue coat, yellow vest white neck cloth with stiffner and frilled shirt – he is one of the Queen Ann folks’. The pretty brick so-called Queen Anne style of the 1870s which Thomson thus mocked was the architecture of a perplexed generation. Invented largely by ex-assistants of Sir ...”

“... writer of prose, and after the Second World War, every male contender – William Styron, Norman Mailer, Gore Vidal, James Jones, Joseph Heller – had done some service and wanted to write literary masterpieces filled with the perfumes of combat.* It is only in more recent times that the task of writing novels about battle has fallen chiefly to bad ...”

“... a visit to Greenwich fair. On her honeymoon in America, she attended a fancy dress ball at the White House as an Arab maiden with golden coins in her hair. But though she adored the fictional stereotype of the Oriental princess, she disliked the condition of contemporary Algerian women. Her refined Unitarian instincts rebelled against the social and ...”

“... brilliant criminal and the subject of one of the great pieces of modern American writing, Norman Mailer’s The Executioner’s Song. Gilmore forswore further appeals and faced the firing squad wearing his famously indestructible Timex watch: scarcely typical and followed by a mere trickle of other deaths. There were no executions in 1978 or 1980, one ...”

“... into quiet conversation. Ice-cream kiss of almond blossom, bridal abundance of cherry: pink and white. Yellow pom-poms of japonica, horticultural cheerleaders. In a corner, under a high wall that gives away the previous identity of this public park as a decommissioned energy-generating plant, retired workers sway, stiffly and slowly, in t’ai chi ...”

“... Third Policeman. How far Father Tebbit actually travelled in his quest for employment is unclear. Norman was born in Ponders End and elected to Parliament as the member for Chingford, a distance of about three miles. Ponders End is more of a transport collision than a settlement and nobody needs much political arm-twisting to move on. Probably the best ...”

“... or persuade.’ Hitler was dead, he concluded, but ‘the poison has not disappeared’, and ‘white civilisation … is as responsible for its perversions as for its successes.’Camus used his North American tour to audition ideas he would later develop in L’Homme révolté (The Rebel), a critique of revolutionary violence published in 1951. Speaking ...”

“... wave-line may wait to fall,yet (waiting for its falling)still the wind may take,from off its crest,white flake on flake of foam,that risesseeming to dart and pulseand rend the light,so my mind hesitatesabove the passionquivering yet to break[…]will the sound break at lastas the wave hesitant,or will the whole night passand I lie listening awake?H.D.’s ...”

“... can be divided into three distinct periods: the first period was from their settlement with the Norman Conquest untill their expulsion from England in 1290; the middle period ends with unofficial toleration under Cromwell in 1655, when England was nominally Judenrein, although many individual Jews did make their way there; the last period shows the Jews in ...”

“... Lance Richardson speculates that they may have discussed poetry. Both men were protégés of Norman Holmes Pearson, an instructor in the English department at Yale. Pearson was a correspondent of Ezra Pound and Wallace Stevens as well as F.O. Matthiessen, the Harvard scholar and cousin of his pupil, who had taken his own life earlier in 1950 under a ...”

“... made him a lasting poet, as he must have known.The breakthrough begins with his 1949 volume, The White Threshold, and was consolidated in his most famous work, the long poem ‘The Nightfishing’, included in the volume of that title in 1955. Both collections, published by Faber, had been signed up by T.S. Eliot, who would prove a wise and supportive ...”

“... in 1960s London, and his grandfather, Bruno, was one of the principal designers of the White City estate in northern Berlin, one of a cluster of social housing projects from the Weimar era to be given a Unesco World Heritage listing. It is a commonplace that modern architecture in Britain, as an ideology, was an import from interwar Central Europe ...”

“... its whiteness. When he opened his mouth he looked to Vivienne like ‘a big red hole in a white face’ but then he started helping her make the jewellery. ‘I was very impressed by his designs. They were very mod.’ Soon they were sleeping together and in 1967, she gave birth to a son, Joe. A great deal has been written about the partnership, both ...”

“... on stage. As Cage watched the Happening unfold, his eyes were drawn towards a series of all-white canvases by Robert Rauschenberg that were pinned to the ceiling, and the idea of a piece without any ostensible ‘musical’ content was born. Cage’s increasing infamy through the 1950s was largely due to 4’33”, which premiered a few weeks after the ...”

“... The novel contains hideous and wholly convincing battle descriptions. We learn the effect of white phosphorus on the human body (the blood boils subcutaneously). Apparently there are problems in conducting a body count after a B-52 raid: many of the corpses are reduced to a mere stain and body parts find their ways to the tops of trees. It is, it ...”