“... there’s a roof that needs retiling, and painted over the door of that mansion is a fading St Christopher. A further scale down, inhabitants appear: the finely dressed know-all, five millimetres high, who leans out from the window next to the mansion door, wisecracking to a friend; or the madam and client – perhaps – below the nearest downspout. I ...”

“... leg of a dead Moor. The man awoke to find himself healed, but for the rest of his life, he had one white leg and one black. Not all miracles healed. The saints could also liberate prisoners, bring rain or fair weather, give children to the barren and bring about victory in combat or in court. But when scorned, they wrought ferocious miracles of ...”

“... of which high thinking and plain living were to be enduring characteristics. After one glass of white wine had been poured, Clapp remembers ruefully, the bottle would be recorked and put back in the fridge. Clearly Carter, who believed that ‘our lives are all about our childhoods,’ was from an early age having interesting experiences in her ...”

“... editors, ‘I wish to point out to you, an editor of the New Yorker,’ he writes to Katharine White, ‘that Mr West’s review of Augie March is disgraceful … Let us hope that it is only my mental health that is endangered and not that of your readers as well.’ Two weeks later, he is putting on his best shirt for Lionel Trilling. ‘The many ...”

“... picturing, from the Niaux horse to yesterday’s art student – via, for instance, the neolithic White Horse at Uffington, the black horses on Greek vases and the blue horses of Franz Marc. But the transitions between then and now supplied by those tales of material change are so radical that they point us back to one central assumption about our ...”

“... Youthful​ and moustachioed, he strikes a dashing pose in his plumed helmet, red velvet jacket and white foustanella, hand on hip, legs apart, a scimitar at his side. This is Major Richard Church of the British-funded 1st Regiment Greek Light Infantry, as painted in 1813 by Denis Dighton. At the time, he was commanding Greek soldiers he had recruited to fight against Napoleon ...”

“... into the Mediterranean sunlight ‘in a Greek boat … singing words in an unknown tongue, the white pigeons circling around her’. Pater counted Lee as a disciple, but she had her own point to make about female sovereignty.‘Oke of Okehurst’ is, unusually among these stories, set in England. Alice Oke, like Trepka, has been fatally ensnared by her ...”

“... in the evolution of domestic comfort’. From the moment of that 1925 pavilion, ‘only white austerity was virtuous. Decoration was bad for the soul; it had to be stripped away.’ The freakshow continues right up to the present. Rybczynski deplores the damage done by the ‘socialist post-war governments in England, Germany, Holland and the ...”

“... serious but highly readable, were reappearing as Ash wrote: Rosalind Mitchison, T.C. Smout and Christopher Harvie were among the most successful authors. They wrote mostly narrative or social history, revealing unknown territory to generations who had learned almost nothing of Scotland’s past at school. Now, though, the fashion is more reflexive. Tom ...”

“... to mean many things apart from indissoluble union, but even (or especially) on this reading Edmund White finds the image ‘chilling’, and George Painter has this to say: If [Mme Proust’s] words were given their full, terrible meaning they would imply a mystic union with her son more valid than her marriage, in an alien faith, to his father. But their ...”

“... which made its targets unrealistic. The new Ministry of Technology, intended to fan the ‘white heat’ of revolution, merely collected problems piecemeal as industries continued to decline. Labour opposed monopolies – but favoured mergers. Britain’s share of world exports of manufactures fell from 12.7 per cent in 1960 to 8.6 in 1970, reflecting ...”

“... ran an ‘economic emancipation’ campaign on behalf of the Guptas and Duduzane Zuma attacking ‘white monopoly capital’ – as distinguished, presumably, from the Guptas’ non-white monopoly capital. Europe’s largest software maker, SAP, paid kickbacks to a Gupta front company to get its customer service software ...”

“... being made, adapted from a memoir he would never complete, to be called ‘The Return of the Thin White Duke’. This dubious pseudonymous character was first aired in an interview with Rolling Stone’s bumptious but canny young reporter Cameron Crowe; it soon became notorious. Crowe’s scene-setting picture of Bowie at home featured black candles and ...”

“... punishment any more (except for Islamic fundamentalists and those Christian evangelicals who think Christopher Hitchens will go to hell), but the concept of an afterlife is still hard to throw over. The other day, my parents told me of an ageing friend who had recently abandoned his lifelong atheism and become a Christian. He told my parents, both churchgoing ...”

“... A long pine table which gave Marks plenty of elbow room to roll his herbal mixes. He was in a white shirt, unbuttoned to expose ‘chunks of magical Buddhist gold’. The hair had recovered its collartickling insolence. The voice was strong, warm and macerated in phlegm. He had the genial, tannin glaze of a resting Stone: Ronnie Wood morphing into Bill ...”