“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... contributions from Jane Ohlmeyer on Ireland and Scotland as ‘laboratories of Empire’, and from Peter Mancall on the troubled relationship between Europeans and Native Americans in the 16th and 17th centuries. The second volume, concerned principally with slavery and the American Revolution, has a sparkling chapter on Native Americans by Daniel Richter, and ...”

“... is not matched by visual or verbal precision. His palette is vivid, but his facture is slack. Peter Robinson’s Leaf-Viewing is a slender, finely-produced pamphlet which comes complete with a commentary by Peter Swaab. The commentary is helpful and perceptive, but it raises the question of why – other than to fill ...”

“... subjects, the British found the governments of their African colonies becoming less and less white, as nationalists demanded and were given seats on the Executive and Legislative Councils which they perceived, in spite of British remonstrances, as precursors of cabinets and parliaments. The moment then arrived when independence seemed inevitable or ...”

“... nostrils of a Quentin Blake drawing, smiles and cigarillos in a well-defended study, a thatch of white hair. ‘New Updike,’ he might think, with a little uptick of a tricky heart, as he came across a trifling piece in the New Yorker, a meatier story in Playboy, a new novel every few years, all backgrounded by the same infusions of radio and television and ...”

“... below them, the town; beneath the clutter of chimneys and dormers rising from pantiled roofs, four white sails seem to hang above the water. Berry admits that ‘the man in the tweed cap first drew me to this scene’ at a time when tweed caps ‘were already becoming unfashionable’. His remark gets to the heart of a book in which the sense of vanishing ...”

“... upper wooden portions of the scaffolding are plastered with posters advertising the exhibition in white letters on a severe black background. Much has been made of the return of drugs to tourist-friendly Times Square: much less of the aptness of using a building once owned by a movie studio to conjure a new view of the war on terror. A young security guard ...”

“... Watson at Gonville and Caius. (Mr Prynne, I’m told, doesn’t have much use for fiction: Patrick White excepted.) Poetry was struck off in the Eighties. Now it’s a special-interest item, available on prescription – like Southern Gothic vampirism, Uzi and crack Brixton scorchers, cyberpunk. Like the rest of genre fiction it is dealt with in compendium ...”

“... as in Eisenhower’s America, but dull nonetheless, not to mention smug. It is not surprising that Peter Hennessy should call his monumental history Having It So Good, nor that Dominic Sandbrook should call his equally monumental recent history of the late 1950s and early 1960s Never Had It So Good. This neatly illustrates the drawback of ...”

“... against earthquakes; their double brick walls, proof against Tibet’s winters; and their austere white façades decorated with black-painted window frames and enlivened by fluttering pelmets – has largely been bulldozed. The remnants are now known as the Tibetan city, a small island in the sea of the new Chinese city. Every spring, the Dalai Lama used to ...”