“... narrow eye Black-bottomed whitewear out of nowhere fast You see the azure through the muscatel The white opacities we hear as thunder The fact that each is an iambic pentameter disturbs their individual impact by turning them, in this listing, into a sort of joke stanza such as people have often made up by bringing together totally unrelated lines. It also ...”

“... of its namesake, seems consecrated to the unusual and the mortifying. The current show – Joel-Peter Witkin’s photographs of corpses, amputees and hermaphrodites – holds a grotesqueness sufficient to remind the visitor of how sweet, how antique already, the infamous Mapplethorpe images have become. At least his models were alive. Circumstance has ...”

“... Literature should be naked,’ Peter Stamm writes. Words should never obscure the story, ‘its warmth, its form, its vitality’. It’s form that critics in Germany and his native Switzerland are talking about when they compare Stamm to Raymond Carver. Take ‘The True Pure Land’, one of his more ‘naked’ stories ...”

“... of caviar are available all year round.‘People are gaining more confidence in sushi,’ said Peter Morrison, Manager, Trading Division. ‘We have joined forces with very credible traders such as Yo! Sushi and we aim to educate customers by bringing them here.’ Alison handed me a cup of liquid grass from the fresh juice bar, Crussh. There was something ...”

“... has now become ‘our gardenia’, a look which situates us ‘in the same relationship to that white blossom of tactile paint as the soda jerk’ who savours the perfume while we ‘inhale the atmosphere’. ‘When I was eight years old,’ Hickey writes, ‘Johnny Mercer was teaching me how to listen, and Norman Rockwell was teaching me how to ...”

“... light on the issue of whether ameliorism worked. Did the experts do any good? Charles Madge and Peter Willmott compare Inner-City Poverty in Paris and London, Peter Hall edits an SSRC Working Party’s Reports on The Inner City in Context, Michael Harloe, in New Perspectives in Urban Change and Conflict, edits papers ...”

“... a young couple at a cocktail party – the boy in ‘an army fatigue jacket’ and the girl in a white leather suit – to the old woman from whom she tries to buy an omelette pan, treat her with such awful condescension? These are not comfortable questions, and Desperate Characters is not a comfortable book. It is, however, both unsparing and tender in its ...”

“... There is undoubtedly a gap in the market.  The Telegraph reports that I claimed for a black and white TV licence, the subject of much amusement among my colleagues. Today’s tabloids are particularly vicious. Not for them magnanimity in victory. ‘Arise Lord Gorbals’, the front page of the Mail sneers over a story focusing on the size of the Speaker’s ...”

“... topical image of the RAF roundel’. It’s a patriotic emblem, especially when viewed in the red, white and blue of Technicolor, but the Archers was notable for its use of Pressburger’s fellow exiles: the German Alfred Junge, whom Powell called ‘the greatest art director that films have ever known’; the Polish composer Allan Gray (whose real name was ...”

“... landscape at the mouth of the Thames Estuary. I should be out there now. I have been brooding on Peter Ackroyd’s notion that the Thames is a river like the Ganges or the Jordan, a place of pilgrimage, a source of spiritual renewal. ‘The river itself becomes a tremulous deity,’ he asserts. I carried Ackroyd’s epic, Thames: Sacred River, as I made a ...”

“... Then in Leviathan, published some years later, Auster uses the same initials for the narrator, Peter Aaron; and anagrammatic sleight of hand (Delia/Lydia, Iris/Siri: Auster’s real-life loves past and present) further blurs the boundaries between his facts and his fictions. So one approaches his openly autobiographical Hand to Mouth with ...”

“... in the land of Catita, where Jackanapes flies with his tail in his mouth, to seek out a lady as white as snow and as red as blood?’ Jack is dead. The character who speaks to Eumenides here, and asks to be taken into his service, is the grateful ghost of a poor man for whose burial Eumenides, although a stranger and mere passer-by, had earlier and ...”

“... hubbub ... The Hunter-Indian; Moors Malays, Lascars, the Tartar, the Chinese And Negro Ladies in white muslin Gowns. By the 19th century, however, little mention was made of black people in the London press. Many had run away from their masters to lead anonymous, fugitive lives. Some died of poverty or went to sea; some were transported to America or, more ...”

“... some exquisite piece of classical statuary, her features sharply chiselled, her skin alabaster white, her raven-dark hair swept chastely back, demure yet enigmatic.’ You’d know from this book that Romantic writers had one hell of a time, but you wouldn’t guess at the depth of their intelligence and ...”

“... getting under the feet of Darmon the historian. The moralist sees everything in black and white (mainly black). He praises occasional ‘liberal’ attitudes but condemns what he calls – in defiance of his own chronology – ‘iniquitous Medieval severity’. Among his favourite adjectives, or his translator’s (but the difference between the ...”