“... truly represent a distinct mutant species of crybaby. Ellis’s​ first non-fiction work, White, is an expansion of his podcast concerns and complaints but not a deepening – more of a distention. Although the book has been promoted as an ‘incendiary polemic’, it’s more of a lazy Susan of memoir, cultural reflections, pharmacological ...”

“... spines, nut-brown at the base, rising to a strip of black and changing at the very tip to purest white. When threatened, they roll into an impenetrable ball, which deters almost all animals with the exception of badgers, and us: Pliny wrote that you could unroll them by sprinkling boiling water on their backs, which, unlike his dietary information, does seem ...”

“... each and tells us that ‘the raging sea boils.’ You could say that, and you could also say, as Richard Taylor does in his book on the film, that Eisenstein is showing us what moving pictures alone can do by way of representing reality, is remembering all the shifting, unfaked water in the work of the Lumière Brothers, for example. Or you could just watch ...”

“... Steele, Prior), aristocrats (the Marquess of Rockingham, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu) and doctors (Richard Mead, Sir Hans Sloane). But he turned down an offer to be the King’s Painter because he objected to ‘the slavery of court dependence’. His writings on art were read widely (his Essay on the Theory of Painting, published in 1715, was on Delacroix’s ...”

“... he was the graphic equal of Irving Penn and a far stranger photographer than, say, David Bailey or Richard Avedon. But then he has long been ambivalent about his fashion photography; already in 1966 he had skewered that milieu with Who Are You, Polly Maggoo?, the first in a series of satirical films that would take up much of his next decade. Klein effectively ...”

“... way you have to concentrate to keep your sense of direction. I suppose it’s much the same with white-outs in the Arctic or the mountains, but I’ve never been in one of those. Once you enter the bright clamminess of Blind Light the experience you have is about as structureless as any a three-dimensional work can offer – more so, for example, than what ...”

“... are passages of wiry drawing in some plates – for example, the figure of Pitt as Death and the white horse which carries him in Presages of the Millennium – which only the most vigorous and controlled pen drawing could match, and which only a master in either medium could achieve. Gillray’s first ambition was to be a reproductive engraver (...”

“... of activity was Piccadilly, with its toilets and rent boys – there was even a gay bar called the White Bear with an entrance in Piccadilly Circus Underground Station. Policemen sat around drinking tea in the attendant’s room of public lavatories, scratching at the white painted glass to get a better look at the ...”

“... takes his epigraph from Kipling’s novel) and Colonel Skinner, and masters of disguise like Richard Burton. Forrester is not the only one caught in the powerful storm. A beautiful, ‘ungovernable’ woman, Amrita, is in a palanquin on her way to get married. In the storm, which rapidly becomes a flood, she is separated from her retinue; she discovers ...”

“... to become Amiri Baraka) held forth, along with the Black saxophonist Archie Shepp and the white painter Larry Rivers. The audience was composed almost entirely of people like me and my friends: white middle-class liberals and radicals, many of whom were veteran civil rights activists. We had trooped into the ...”

“... The well-paced, ironic narrative, cleverly modulating into the bemused, commonsensical natter of white neighbours watching the black suburb enlarge itself, has the effect of a growing cycle of legends. The Luther Nedeed of our own day is a grave and rational man, it appears, consciously offering ‘role-models’ to black bourgeois, but he is also a man ...”

“... be vindicated in their appeals, even though they had one trump card up their sleeves: they were white. The petitioners’ circumstances were unusual: they had been transported to Barbados as suspected Royalist insurgents after the failed Salisbury Uprising of 1655. But, in the mid-17th century, white people could be found ...”

“... of the Amazonian shoot of Fitzcarraldo (in an attempt to bring Caruso to the Indians, a possessed white man decides to haul a river steamer over a jungle hill). A notably phlegmatic man, judging from his quintessentially Californian celebration Garlic is as good as ten mothers, Blank had the good fortune to be stranded in exactly the right place at exactly ...”

“... police preparations for the bank holiday weekend festival. ‘Committed historians’ was a phrase Richard Cobb used in The Police and the People to describe the police in France at the time of the Revolution. Their reports on crime and violence, in Cobb’s view, made them reliable witnesses, able to state what they had seen and heard, and to form an idea of ...”

“... politics, in individual rights rather than collective ones. Moreover, they had come to perceive white working-class men as the enemy: racist, patriarchal and jingoistic, fatally tainted by ‘white skin privilege’. The trade-union bureaucrats were just as hostile to McGovernites and refused to endorse their ...”