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“... off by the Ukip MEP Godfrey Bloom for not cleaning behind the fridge), and not all of us were white: demographically unpromising candidates for membership in a party which is anyway tiny – an order of magnitude smaller than Labour or the Tories, its membership amounts to 0.06 per cent of the electorate. The amateur Ukip enthusiast may have meant only ...”

“... had bred 2123 dogs and owned 2696.They are often like this, the ‘Doggy People’ who feature in Michael Worboys’s study of twenty ‘eminent and not so eminent Victorians who were the modern dog’s makers’: muscular, energetic, eccentric, polymathic. Kathleen Pelham-Clinton, the Duchess of Newcastle, who imported the borzoi breed from Russia into ...”

“... The grisliest scene in Reservoir Dogs concerns the torture of a policeman by Mr Blonde, played by Michael Madsen. The violence is funny, but it’s also hair-raising, haunting in insidious ways, not like the thuggishness of the moment I mentioned in Pulp Fiction. ‘I don’t know anything!’ the policeman says. ‘You can torture me if you want ...”

“... had been got up to look like a charity case, or a Wanted poster. Dead or alive. ‘Vote Michael Moorcock’, it said. ‘King of the City’. King of the City, a hefty London novel, character-packed, busy with competing narratives (confessing, denouncing, celebrating, plea-bargaining for its own sanity), was being punted by its publicists as ‘the ...”

“... South Africa, he began a story written in a straightforward realist style in which white refugees gather on Robben Island (at that time Mandela’s prison) to escape the collapsing republic. The plot goes nowhere. Coetzee dismisses each false start with the word ‘abandoned’. Initially his hero is a forty-year old Greek man, an ex-teacher of ...”

“... with no imagination to make a heartbeat’, they long for ‘flashy continental composers in white macs’ carrying ‘pamphlets and lectures in bison-skin despatch-cases’. It’s partly meant to be a parody of the English arts scene – there was less shepherd’s pie in Düsseldorf, probably – but when you look at photographs of Tonks from the time ...”

“... style of interesting poets like Peter Didsbury, John Ash, Pauline Stainer and one of the editors, Michael Hulse, is not particularly ‘democratic’, but playfully enigmatic and donnish. There is a tendency to think aloud with a somewhat creaky jauntiness, as if the poets were sharing secrets with their desks; It has been raining all day, and I found myself ...”

“... European allies. He also defended it in the House of Commons, and the foreign secretary, Michael Stewart, even appeared on television to defend American actions. At a televised ‘teach in’ in Oxford in June 1965, Stewart argued that ‘the future relationship between North and South could, in time, be a matter for the genuine free decisions of the ...”

“... in Britain that he is articulating, or to underestimate the support he is drawing from many white-collar workers, pensioners, unemployed and others, who feel that he at least is taking on Mrs Thatcher in a way that nobody else is. Two statistics reveal a lot about Mrs Thatcher’s Britain. One is the unemployment rate, which has more than doubled since ...”

“... Australia’s most celebrated historian, Manning Clark, and its most celebrated writer, Patrick White. A new bitterness, of the kind that divided Britain over Suez and the United States over Vietnam, now split Australia. That Whitlam had greatly contributed to his own destruction by his indifference to economic reality – the oil price rise came soon after ...”

“... to fight his closed-shop policy got branded as Communists. He helped set JFK on his path to the White House, and he got quite cross when Attorney-General Bobby, whose father Joe had been a rival bootlegger in the Thirties, started to hound him. Connoisseurs still marvel at the brazen way he outmanoeuvred the law. The day the game was finally up, he had his ...”

“... stupidly discover, is their terrible lack of each other. Lottie paints her handsome house white all over, goes to Paris, sees old friends, gets entangled with a florid (and as it turns out kooky) Swiss tycoon. Harold retreats to Bournemouth, stares at the sea, meets an art student, takes her to Paris, falls out with her, stays on alone, and comes back ...”

“... through his secret, his unknowability.’ And later: ‘All the banned words, the secrets kept in white-washed vaults, the half-forgotten plots – they’re all out here now, seeping invisibly into the land and air, into the marrowed folds of the bone.’ There’s a paradox here, because the seeping secrets are still invisible, although out in the ...”

“... appearance, and the sound of a ‘voix nouvelle et blanche’ (‘new and white voice’) coming from her throat. She is not a person any more, just language, the way the god talks when he needs to talk to mortals.La Jeune Parque is a poem of 521 lines, divided into 16 sections. Each line has 12 syllables, and the lines rhyme in ...”

“... for the properly reformed, the ‘sacrament’ that seals this usurper’s claim to reunite ‘the white rose and the red’ was a piece of heretical mummery. No wonder then that the syntax of Richmond’s most conspicuous address to the theatre audience – ‘What traitor hears me, and says not “Amen”?’ – remains so dangerously ...”