“... projects by Colquhoun and Miller, one in Camden and another in Hackney, where an icy, high-style white-walled modernism, derived from the work of Adolf Loos and Giuseppe Terragni, somehow morphs into the typology of the London Victorian semi, for a clientele of Camden and Hackney council tenants. Today, NW1’s role has largely been supplanted by E1, and the ...”

“... involved. The marriage lasted 82 days before Louis succumbed, possibly to overexcitement. Wearing white for mourning, Mary Rose was sequestered until it could be known if she was carrying a child. She was not, but during this period ‘la reine blanche’ felt vulnerable: the new king, Francis, would penetrate her seclusion and make insinuations. She thought ...”

“... as a symptom of oncoming dementia. The next day I went to see the Medical Officer, an elegant white-faced man, quite young, who had given up a successful practice as a dermatologist, and I confided to him my anxieties. In doing so, I must have embarrassed him. ‘Don’t worry, old boy,’ he said over and over again, as he led me to the door of his ...”

“... middle-class America. But neither ignores the political dimensions of their extraordinary story. Norman Cousins, the journalist who organised the Maidens’ expedition, was known as an anti-nuclear campaigner, and the US authorities didn’t initially like his project. Yet it became clear that the gesture might symbolise US friendship for Japan, and US ...”

“... discovery of the Romantic poets continues to be made. What Coleridge put in a notebook – the white dung of a hawk falling from the sky, the shadows cast on urine by candlelight – could and can go into poetry, along with the wasp trying to get out of the window, a menstrual problem, buying veal, what a husband thought the wife said, what she felt he ...”

“... upon the jury in its other roles and functions. The transplant operation was done in the White Paper ‘Criminal Justice’, Command Paper 9658. This commended the ‘powerful analysis’ of the Roskill Committee, and extended its recommendation that the defence’s right of peremptory challenge should be abolished in fraud trials to all jury ...”

“... straight writer to have a gay hero is still highly unusual. A fascinating essay in this context is Norman Mailer’s ‘The Homosexual as Villain’, commissioned by the gay magazine ONE in the 1950s. He’s pretty unsparing of his own past novelistic practice, saying that when he thought homosexuality was evil it made sense to dole it out to negative ...”

“... moment of humiliation in Roth’s novel comes when Mickey Sabbath, taken in by his old friend Norman Cowan when no one else will help him, is discovered by his host arousing himself with intimate items belonging to Norman’s daughter. In Mother Land it comes when Jay, on another Friday morning invasion of Mother’s ...”

“... thousands of books in his Kremlin apartment and at his dacha in Kuntsevo. There was émigré, White Guard literature, and there were works by old acquaintances whom he had killed: Trotsky, Zinoviev, Kamenev, Bukharin. Their books, confiscated everywhere else in the country, lived on in his library. In the Khrushchev period the library was broken up, and ...”

“... figures have taken a swing at it, in one-offs or batches, including Pound, Beckett, Lowell and Norman Cameron. There have also been the thorough, proselytising translators, above all Wallace Fowlie, who wanted the whole oeuvre turned into English and the legend retold to Anglophone readers. And there was Edgell Rickword, in whom the two strands coincided ...”

“... it appears in a number of items with a redundant hyphen: in 1950 there is a long report, by DI Norman of the marvellously named ‘C.O.C.1’, on the surveillance of ‘Guardsmen engaged in homo-sexual offences’. On repeated acquaintance it strikes one as a word with a peculiar valency, a bastard Greek-Latin compound whose intrinsic meaning of ...”

“... periodicals, including the Washington Post, Commentary and the New Republic. On the other hand, Norman Finkelstein has described the book as one ‘of the most spectacular frauds ever published on the Arab-Israeli conflict’, and in the Nation Alexander Cockburn has called it ‘From Lies Immemorial’.Joan Peters puts forward the following case: the Jews ...”

“... of his lost generation. In the poem which has his flying fish he hails a ‘double’ in a soiled white horse, and it may be that ‘Miss Manice’ doubled for him too. Here and there, the language of the subject is used incidentally or ornamentally, as in the sonnet ‘Lunch Date’, where ‘double life’ may refer to a friendship between black and ...”

“... man’, of ‘Through the Night’, the first section of which ends: ‘The pale green leaf clings white to the lit night/and shakes a little on its stiff, tense twig’ (where only the word ‘little’ is not a monosyllable). I find him browsing along the seam of self and world, like a painter, or like a European poet, not unlike Montale or Pasternak, the ...”

“... miles from any other major town. Here Nazarbayev has built a presidential palace larger than the White House. With money no object, the president had no difficulty in recruiting top architects like Norman Foster, who designed the 62-metre-high pyramid known as the Palace of Peace and Reconstruction. The city is built in a ...”