“... began to look like sulking. Prince Humbert of Italy was not amused to find himself staying at the White Hart Inn in Windsor having been told there was no room at the castle. A cartoon of Buckingham Palace with a ‘To Let’ sign, rumours that Victoria had gone mad or was about to abdicate, the Saturday Review’s pointed remarks about ‘seclusion’ being ...”

“... Tichbornism had in it a strong element of popular Toryism and nostalgia for the days before the Norman Yoke. Rather despairingly, McWilliam concludes that ‘the best way to think of it is as a form of pastiche.’ Pastiche of what exactly, and who is doing the pastiching? McWilliam repeatedly tries to anchor the affair to a unique set of historical ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... are all very well, but these advocates of ‘Management by Walking Around’ (MBWA) are topped by Norman Augustine, a former President of the American Institute of Aeuronautics and Astronautics, who has come up with 52, one for each week of the year. Augustine’s Laws uses its axioms to mock bureaucratic routine, state regulation of economic ...”

“... indifferent to the frivolous. With the exception of an occasional movie (both Lionel Trilling and Norman Podhoretz engaged in cinematic cinq-à- sept), mass culture’s pleasures were hard to admit. Clement Greenberg argued in a 1939 PR essay that kitsch drew on ‘simulacra of genuine culture’. Apart from drinking a lot, the PR writers were American Jewish ...”

“... space, or time; here, it was the opposite. The Ellington and Hereson School is a set of shining white blocks built in 2007 as part of Labour’s PFI programme. As well as Farage, Charlie Leys, the sixth-former who had organised and was chairing the event, had managed to pull in South Thanet’s sitting Tory MP, Laura Sandys, a believer in EU membership who ...”

“... Somewhat incongruously, she had completed her ensemble with a pair of pristine, startlingly white tennis shoes. These made her feet seem comically huge, like Bugs Bunny’s. I half-expected her to bounce several feet up and down in the air whenever she took a step, like one of those people who have shoes made of ‘Flubber’ in the old Fred McMurray ...”

“... and British governments have been ‘overthrown by seaborne invasion at least nine times since the Norman Conquest, in 1139, 1153, 1326, 1399, 1460, 1470, 1471, 1485 and 1688’. There were also plenty of near misses, such as when Louis, the French Dauphin, was offered the English throne after King John’s death and was cheered through the streets of London ...”

“... speech to excoriate Kinnock for his pusillanimity. A future Labour government had waved the white flag before it had even arrived in office: ‘Exposed to the threat of nuclear blackmail,’ she told the conference, ‘there would be no option but surrender.’ She contrasted the weakness of Kinnock’s position with that of more robust Labour ...”

“... Centre at Caversham is a treasure trove, but it’s also a labyrinth in which one expects to find white-haired historians still groping myopically along the endless shelves of files, doomed to uncover material so fascinating that all likelihood of ever finishing any work of scholarship has long since passed.If ever there was a historian to whom the phrase ...”

“... new historians, among them Segev and Naomi Shepherd, the Zionist project is part of the saga of white settlement, as in North America and Rhodesia. The settlers declared independence only when they no longer required the Mother Country’s soldiers to subdue the natives. Presenting Israelis as colonisers, rather than as enemies of imperialism, was once the ...”

“... again, and Betjeman and Pevsner, whose antipathies were more convergent than is claimed). Dazzling white walls, streamlining, vitrolite, green window frames, green pantiles (often blue in Bournemouth). Among its most satisfying examples – i.e. the gaudiest – were apartment blocks at Pinner, Muswell Hill, Smithfield, Highgate. They are the décor of film ...”

“... for 1996, then 1998, then spring, summer, autumn and now late December 1999. An interesting white-knuckle ride for the politicians. The line has soaked up, so far, around £3.3 billion, but its apologists (cursing critics as spoil-sports) speak airily of how all major construction projects come in a whisker over budget. Look at the Channel Tunnel, the ...”

“... voices of the victims, that is what it feels like too. Aids starts in the 1970s. Here’s Edmund White, describing the San Francisco gay ‘look’ in his travel book States of Desire (1980). Bodies made themselves intelligible: A strongly marked mouth and swimming, soulful eyes (the effect of the moustache); a V-shaped torso by metonymy from the open V of ...”

“... financial crisis which seems finally to have been solved by Lewis Golden, the accountant on the white horse who Wells sees as a figure as heroic as Carlyle in the annals of the Library. All the other large and small circulating and subscription libraries of the Victorian and Edwardian eras – Boot’s, Mudie’s and thousands of cornershop twopenny-loan ...”