“... of Frances Stonor Saunders’s biography of Sir John Hawkwood (c.1320-94), one-time leader of the White Company made famous by Conan Doyle’s historical novels. The 14th century was indeed an age of opportunity for military adventurers, and for mercenary soldiers in particular. Independent companies, led by seasoned captains, and with their own internal ...”

“... papal bull from 1494.) For much of the 16th and 17th centuries, British mills produced little white paper, and mostly made coarse,brown papers for wrapping; it took the arrival of Huguenot papermakers, fleeing France after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes (1685), to provide the manufacturing skill needed to produce fine ...”

“... China material (perhaps deliberately, Freeman suggested to me), and he handed the memcon over to a White House official. It was never seen again. ‘Probably shredded,’ Freeman said.Washington was so anxious to assist Saddam in the war the US had encouraged that CIA emissaries posted to Iraq were authorised to deliver invaluable intelligence material without ...”

“... man who became her second husband, John McHale, she was largely forgotten in Britain. The sculptor Richard Smith, and McHale himself, suffered similar neglect after leaving the UK.By the time I visited her, Cordell’s memories of the 1950s were patchy. For long stretches we said little. She smoked Carlton 100s and showed me a few collages by McHale that she ...”

“... a single journalist of the overpaid legions who swarm around the Pentagon, State Department and White House has ever bothered to investigate it. Iraq might once have been a potential challenge to Israel. It was the one Arab country with the human and natural resources, as well as the infrastructure, to take on Israel’s arrogant brutality. That is why ...”

“... a new opiate painkiller called OxyContin. At a party celebrating its release to the public, Richard Sackler, a scion of the family that owns the company and its senior vice president of sales, made exuberant predictions about its success. ‘The launch of OxyContin tablets will be followed by a blizzard of prescriptions that will bury the ...”

“... the weather in other ways, though they borrow from the painter’s repertoire. In 1784 Gilbert White wrote of a freezing, clear December day that ‘the air was full of icy spiculae, floating in all directions, like atoms in a sun-beam let into a dark room.’ The Farnham diarist George Sturt recorded the end of a winter’s day in Victorian Surrey with a ...”

“... was called Lessons of Darkness. In his signature works of that time, arrays of old black and white photos, blown-up and blurry, hung in darkened spaces, each with a lamp right in front of it – blocking one’s view while also making the photo visible. These works were memorials of a sort, not to specific individuals (the subjects of the photographs ...”

“... in 1962? Or Gillian Ayres’s titles, which run in epochs. As her work falls into her floating-on-white early Sixties mode, there’s a move to monosyllables; Lure, Scud, Blimps. In the Eighties come the quotation-like titles, as if lifted from Elizabethan madrigals: Ah Mine Heart, Flow Not So Fast Ye Fountains, Zephyrus eke with his Sweet Breath. Some, like ...”

“... Sir, The quicker Richard Branson sells Virgin Railways and moves on the better. The last two occasions my wife has had the misfortune to use his wretched railway she has been 60 minutes and 110 minutes late. We are sick and tired of his artificial smile (it reminds us of Mr Blair’s) and his publicity forever in the press and on television ...”

“... Hits Iceberg’, the balloon is still an object of inexhaustible rhetorical possibility. As Richard Holmes observes early in Falling Upwards, ‘all balloon flights are naturally three-act dramas’: the launch, the flight and the landing replicate the stages of every journey or human relationship – a set of parallels most recently and memorably ...”

“... café’. In his account of the history of psychiatry in French colonial North Africa, Richard Keller argues that the psychiatric profession was particularly influential in discussions about the ‘civilising’ mission of French colonialism and the meaning of difference for Republican citizenship. He is at pains to demonstrate that psychiatry in ...”

“... diasporic circles. The Jamaican poet Mutabaruka responded with his own performance poem, ‘White Man Country’, whose central refrain Johnson quoted in a piece in the Guardian in 2005: ‘it no good fi stay inna white man country too long.’ The piece is collected in Time Come, a selection of Johnson’s prose from ...”

“... for the Egoist, and on which Knox drew for his parody (it begins: ‘To-night again the moon’s white mat/Stretches across the dormitory floor’) – a sixteen-year-old French boy recalls escaping from boarding school to go to the circus. ‘The black clown, with his dirty grin/ Lay, sprawling in the dust, as She rode in’:She laughed at the black clown ...”

“... bleached and drained of blood by the ruins, basilicas and colossi of Rome, those ‘long vistas of white forms whose marble eyes seemed to hold the monstrous light of an alien world’. For the new Mrs Casaubon, Rome’s spiritual splendour, its role as historic centre, could only suck the colour from the present day, and I wondered, looking at those two ...”