“... narrator’s mother, the painter Aurora Zogoiby. She herself is a dazzling character, prematurely white-haired, beautiful, fearless, limitlessly talented – ‘Listen: she was the light of our lives, the excitement of our imaginations, the beloved of our dreams. We loved her even as she destroyed us’ – but she is not as memorable or as complicated as her ...”

“... themselves to Shavian relics, such as cuttings from GBS’s beard. ‘Cut a wisp off the nearest white dog,’ Shaw advised, ‘it will do just as well.’ In his disenchantment with the human species, it was sometimes amusing for Shaw to observe the animated quarrels of his acolytes. Loewenstein, a stout, dark middle-aged man with a homely if forceful ...”

“... but in recompense discovered such splendid lands, while we have suffered to discover only ruinous white deserts – and still, you know, it had to be ... The Grand-Dad is slightly longer and quite a bit trickier. The year is 1816. A French aristocrat who miraculously escaped the guillotine in 1792 returns to visit his family home and shelters with some ...”

“... had possessed him, a possession that worked both ways, uncovering a substratum of India within the white colonialist. Kipling’s mother tongue may have been English, but those other mothers, the native nurses and household servants, had left their mark on him. In Echolalias: On the Forgetting of Language, Daniel Heller-Roazen recounts a parallel story. Elias ...”

“... Cohen, the model for Justine, at the Scottish School for Girls. From ‘Vintage Alexandria’ by Michael Haag (American University in Cairo Press, $39.95). And then there are the carefully rendered deaths, remarkable in their variety. There is the dying of the furrier Cohen, former patron of Darley’s fragile mistress Melissa, a man who lies in a hospital ...”

“... and never wanted to see another book after that.’ All I can say is, he deserved his black and white tiles. He has both autonomy and tact. His translation is full of character, marvellously pointed but in touch with timelessness, relished but without striving for effect. We are in the world of Briggflatts, of Patrick Kavanagh’s ‘The Great Hunger’ or ...”

“... and a voice. The first reading took place at the Six Gallery in San Francisco on 7 October 1955. Michael McClure who also read that night along with Gary Snyder, Philip Whalen and Philip Lamantia, describes the poem’s impact in Scratching the Beat Surface (1982): I hadn’t seen Allen in a few weeks and I had not heard Howl – it was new to me. Allen ...”

“... one of the last cottages to be burned down in an eviction.The detection of ‘savages beneath our white skins’ exhilarated him. He preferred H. Rider Haggard and Robert Louis Stevenson to Henry James, because their romances seemed to have a primitive gusto. Although Lang co-wrote a fantasy novel with Haggard, his most effective literary use of anthropology ...”

“... under whose Big Brotherly gaze they had been working. I concluded that if De Beers could sack white people on such a flimsy basis in good old democratic London, they were perfectly capable of designing special machines to sift through black miners’ shit in Kimberley and the Cape. It is 25 years since Laurie Flynn helped to occupy the London School of ...”

“... In the week beginning 7 September, a member of the White House security staff – who else could it have been? – sent Matt Drudge, cyber muckraker, a CCTV clip, ‘on condition that its origin and owner not be disclosed’. The tape showed the President returning from his morning jog in August 1993 accompanied by a troupe of bodyguards and young staffers ...”

“... by a rare combination of circumstances: they were both educated and free.Many black men married white Englishwomen. Diatribes against intermarriage appeared, written by men such as the plantation owner Edward Long. This shouldn’t be taken as clear proof of widespread hostility to interracial couples. Their descendants also intermarried and ...”

“... of scarlet in evidence, in the robes of the assembled Council and of sundry invited academics, white in the vestments of the local clergy, and a respectable quantity of gold in the mayoral chains of office; there are any number of sombre grey suits on visiting diplomats and corporate sponsors; and outside the sunshine, if there is any, glints from the ...”

“... to ‘discover’ extinction in the sense of gaining actual experience of the phenomenon. But, as Michael Neill points out, human beings do imagine dying and in the process they inevitably invent a notion of death capable of matching their presuppositions. To that extent, death could be said to be something that each society discovers for itself. As a ...”

“... not to be confused with a novel of the same title by Anita Brookner). In the earlier book Michael Cullen left working-class Nottingham for the metropolis, fell into the proverbial bad company, and ended up as a convicted gold-smuggler. Now, having been abandoned by his wife after ten years of idleness in the Cambridgeshire village of Upper Mayhem, he ...”

“... was plucked from the Marines to serve on the National Security Council, which is attached to the White House. This was, North is too shy to tell us, a political appointment. The Colonel was chosen because of his right-wing views, which were bolstered, as were the President’s, by fanatical born-again Christianity. North worked closely and happily under ...”