“... vividly in Clarissa’s thoughts on the novel’s opening page, is her old friend and admirer Peter Walsh. In their youth, Peter, too, had been at Bourton, where on a particularly fraught occasion he proposed to her. He’s always felt that she betrayed her best self by settling instead for a cosseted life as Mrs ...”

“... has mostly worn one dress for 27 years. She has had it made forty times, in different fabrics: white for the Miami summer and black for the New York winter and grey for inbetween times. It is softly toga-like; you pull it over your head. She specially likes the way it frames her face. (The man who designed it lives in a trailer in upstate New York and is ...”

“... For voters, feelings prevail over beliefs,’ Peter Mandelson writes in The Third Man. ‘People may be torn between their head and their heart, but ultimately it is their gut feeling that is decisive: they vote for the candidate who elicits the right feelings, not necessarily the one who presents the right arguments ...”

“... glass on a tour of local schools. That year the council’s then leader described Morris as ‘a white imperialist’ of no relevance to Walthamstow. The spectacular row which ensued generated online petitions, national press coverage and representations from the William Morris Society in the United States. Morris’s birthday, 24 March, saw demonstrations ...”

“... a quotation from one of them, is if anything worse.) After this, it is a relief to learn from Peter Levi’s lively and delightful biography that Dr Zhivago (Dr Alive) was a name Pasternak had seen on the cover of a Moscow manhole, rather as Dickens claimed to have spotted a Copperfield and a Chuzzlewit on the signs of poor London shops. Quite apart from ...”

“... but there is certainly nothing finite or controlled about the gloom that grips the country. White morale and confidence have never been lower, and since they and their media still set the tone for the whole society, and since blacks and Coloureds have less in general to feel happy about anyway, this means that the gloom is general. It does also happen ...”

“... in Chronological Order’, which strings together every scene in which Blofeld’s feathery white Persian takes centre stage. It’s shorter than you might think: just three and a half minutes, beginning with the cat’s debut appearance in From Russia with Love (1963), glaring into the middle distance while her master strokes her ears with both ...”

“... money has gone on the inside not the outside of his building, a large proportion of it on white paint. It takes several minutes for the eyes to grow accustomed to the harsh light inside the gleaming cavern. A specially-designed system bounces light up onto the roof panels and then back into the gallery, in an ambitious attempt to mimic natural ...”

“... after Labour’s defeat in the 1970 General Election did Benn break with the Wilsonian agenda. The white heat of the technological revolution had cooled. Benn did not dissimulate his ambition to lead the Labour Party, and as late as 1975 Wilson could flatter and cajole Benn by saying: ‘I’ve got to do this. When you have my job, you’ll have to do ...”

“... painters made only a few kinds of picture. Among Motherwell’s kinds are paintings in black and white of blot or sign-like shapes; a group which shows door and window-like rectangles on wall-like grounds; a third group which combines bumpy cloud-like shapes with smaller patches of brighter colour. A large group of paintings and collages uses writing and ...”

“... in my bed ... Suddenly the window opened of its own accord, and I was terrified to see that some white wolves were sitting on the big walnut tree in front of the window. There were six or seven of them. The wolves were quite white, and looked more like foxes or sheep-dogs, for they had big tails like foxes and they had ...”

“... is free, but facts are sacred.’ By such lofty standards even the Guardian of Peter Preston falls short. Its reporters are men and women with opinions that shine out from its pages. Even if they start their careers with the news, they are hoping for preferment to the editorial pages. With luck, long service and a reputation for ...”

“... fought alongside large numbers of indigenous Indians and Southern blacks who viewed the local white settlers and slave-owners as being more dangerous than the imperial authorities in London. Such clashes but also collaborations between different peoples are surely what make imperial history (and we ideally need another name for it) such a compelling and ...”

“... deal, shares rose again to £4.50 each; Edwards sold £3.7 million shares, making £16.6 million. Peter Reid, the ex-Everton midfielder and manager – and as Sunderland manager, the subject of the BBC fly-on-the-wall docu-tragedy of the club’s relegation, Premier Passions – stands to make hundreds of thousands of pounds should he wish to cash in on his ...”

“... terrible aspect’. It doesn’t apparently, though, for Gilbert Phelps, John Sutherland and Peter Keating, surveyors and encyclopedists of the form who in their respective fields have laboured with energetic exhaustiveness and not broken down. Each of these books feels as if it takes in an infinity of novels, and each deserves the gratitude of those ...”