“... anthems Hymn to St Cecilia (classy words by Auden, usefully decent treble solo)♪ and Hymn to St Peter (eerie plainsong effect, also with coveted treble solo opportunity).♪ In the cathedral, thrillingly at night, that enormous building dark and mysterious beyond our spotlit oasis, we thrashed our way through an evening performance of Noye’s ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... the most publicised recent killing was that of Chris Hani, the SACP (Communist) leader, by the white Right. The Azanian People’s Liberation Army, the armed wing of the Pan Africanist Congress, carries out anti-white atrocities from time to time and, of course, Inkatha takes its vengeance on the ANC with fair ...”

“... aptitude for this life-and-death struggle in Occupied Europe was then transposed to Africa, where white supremacist doctrines that struck a familiar chord had to be known and described. So he was off again, on foot, only now instead of bearing arms, he took notebooks: journeying with nationalist guerrillas and keeping the record were modest expressions of ...”

“... Nations of the famed Iroquois Confederacy were represented. The focus of their attentions was a white man living in their midst, whose father had died the previous winter far away in Ireland. They would arrive in groups at this man’s large and stately home, and would enact for him their ancient tribal ceremonies of ‘condolence’. They would adorn his ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... linear discipline of Josef Hoffmann, obsessed as he was with rectangles, parallels and black and white contrasts, and the linguistic puritanism of Wittgenstein and Karl Kraus. All were against metaphysics, against ambiguity, against sloppiness, against cliché; and, like Mahler at the opera, against routine. Courage failed the organisers in the sections on ...”

“... Box’ is a guitar-shaped concrete poem about poetry with a hole at the centre. Around the white space, Paterson writes:                                             Bert             Kwakkel,     my Dutch                 luthier,     emptied       so much wood out of ...”

“... opposition groups like Pussy Riot being in the pay of the US State Department, showed black and white photos of Berezovsky as touching mood music was played. ‘After all this time,’ the presenter said, ‘and all the roles he’s played, we never did find out who he really was.’ I had a seat for Berezovsky’s last hurrah, the court case in London ...”

“... the reception desk, the conference room, coffee bar and casting department, you reached a closed white door. Many would turn back at this point, thinking they’d seen the whole office. But tap in a code and you entered a much larger set of rooms: here the producers and their assistants sat and argued, here the accountants glided around with spreadsheets and ...”

“... retreat: a. No more champagne is to be bought. Unless special directions are given, only the white or red wine, or whisky and soda will be offered at luncheon, or dinner. The Wine Book to be shown to me every week. No more port is to be opened without special instructions. b. Cigars must be reduced to four a day. None should be put on the table; but ...”

“... can see why Rubens might have been jealous. The old man’s skin, his slightly rheumy eye and the white hair of his beard are wonderfully realised. Rubens tends to make use of a repertoire of effective conventions (the marks for an eyelid, folds in the skin, cheeks and so on) and unites them in a springy dance of brushstrokes. Van Dyck observes finer ...”

“... their clothing and whatever accessories are immediately to hand – chief among them, lit candles. White, black, ochre and vermilion, often the only colours on his palette, kindle a reliable warmth: his brushes use them to explore varieties of surface, but do so without ostentation. Those figures are ‘forms constructed on a surface, on a ground devoid of ...”