“... from ‘exterminating’, whether that referred to the buffalo or the Indian. Mitchell deals with William Cullen Bryant, Frederick Lee Olmsted (concerned with the creation of Central Park), John Muir (Yosemite), Thomas Cole (it is a ‘question of vast importance how far it is practicable to restore the garden we have wasted’), Lyman Draper (‘delving and ...”

“... On page ten the lovers are discovered on a June afternoon: ‘the bed is king-sized, with a white padded headboard and matching white bedside cupboards.’ On page 14 it is the same afternoon, the bed is still king-size and the lovers are still in it: but the bedside tables are now mahogany and match the ...”

“... spiritual renewal; a place, too, that has attracted writers like Sean O’Faolain, Denis Devlin, William Carleton and Patrick Kavanagh; a place where the individual might decently ruminate on his relationship with society.This setting affords Seamus Heaney a remarkable opportunity, of which he takes remarkable advantage, to ruminate, not only on his very ...”

“... original characters. In among the sentences are the curses and commands of invading Teutons. In William Weaver’s translation there is a hint of Molesworth – the young cynic is just getting by in Latin culture, his canniness a substitute for learning. Yet in that greeting to the pygmies Eco has encoded a knowing little allusion. No doubt there were many ...”

“... in sacred groves, their totem plants being oak and mistletoe, the latter harvested by druids in white robes wielding golden sickles. Lucan combines the horrific and naturist elements with a much admired account of a grisly sacrificial wood, allegedly destroyed by Caesar in person, thereby overcoming his soldiers’ superstitious fears. Tacitus provides ...”

“... That the ex-convicts had left the island for gold rushes in other countries. That only pure free white settler stock remained. Like all great lies there was some truth in these assertions . . . But at the end of the day most blackfellas and convicts remained on the island, sick with syphilis and sadness and fear and madness and loss. And when the long night ...”

“... herd instinct. The first zombie movie is generally reckoned to be Victor Halperin’s White Zombie (1932), in which Bela Lugosi plays a mill owner in Haiti who uses voodoo to control his black zombie workers, and to enslave a young white American woman who’s engaged to one of his neighbours. As Kyle ...”

“... inadequate education and the ever present threat of violence (a comprehensive system of white supremacy known by the shorthand Jim Crow), they found employment on the bottom rungs of the burgeoning industrial economy. Despite pervasive prejudice in the North, the migrants spoke of a second emancipation, of crossing the Jordan into the Promised ...”

“... Slotkin writes, rested primarily on racism, which he describes as ‘the division of Black and white, slave and free, into different orders of humanity’. What did this mean for the Myth of the Founding, which, as an aspiration if not in practice, took as its basic premise Jefferson’s words in the Declaration of Independence, ‘All men are created ...”

“... answer that it could have belonged to someone else with the same initials – the Stratford draper William Smith, for instance – but the possibility remains strong that it was Shakespeare’s. It is certainly a genuine ring of the period, and there are other pointers in its favour. The field where it was found, Mill Close, was on land that Shakespeare had ...”

“... sentiment (wild geese and all), or the counterweight Protestant myth in Northern Ireland in which William III for ever rides a white horse. The interest of the Scottish sample of such beliefs lies in the fact that Scottish myths are not an expression of either successful or of frustrated nationalism. They mostly involve ...”

“... respect it is an unfortunate title, suggesting an item from the cast-list of almost any black-and-white film about almost any celebrity, but in the respect that it makes a point of Rebecca West’s youth, it is a good title. The first article is signed by her natural name, Cicily Fairfield: she was so young that she had not yet yielded to whatever weakness it ...”

“... it is worse than that. They all knew what they ought to do. They kept on spelling it out, in every White Paper and Cabinet minute. But they could never face doing it. In 1951, 20 per cent of all public expenditure and nearly 8 per cent of GDP went on defence. The incoming Tory foreign secretary, Anthony Eden, back in his old post, told the Cabinet in June 1952 ...”

“... in sunlight, lovelier than sunshine on cellophane the colors shine: popsicle orange and lemon-ice white, cotton-candy pink and mint-jelly green, cherry-soda red and raspberry-jello red. Cellophane crackles in the green-and-red-tinted dark.’ Here, the frankly nauseating means to evoke the object under scrutiny. With the novelist’s own (as it ...”

“... theatre’s small musty stage into an abattoir, dress the actors as butchers in blood-splattered white coats and hang ‘the criminals’ from their feet like cattle. This, Agim says, is the only way to illustrate the horrors of forty years of Enver Hoxha, the dictator who kept Albania in a Stalinist hell long after the rest of Eastern Europe had rejected ...”