“... learned to talk straight from the shoulder, although Buckoke’s is slightly hunched under the white man’s burden and Kapuściński’s is often set to the wheel of invention, which makes much of his plain speaking deceptive. Only Blaine Harden keeps a respectable posture throughout and can even be quite sanguine in adversity – mostly other ...”

“... of a novel strangeness. ‘Elegy on the Heroine of Childhood’ is written in memory of Pearl White. The death of the queen of the cliffhanger and star of silent masterpieces such as The Perils of Pauline and The Exploits of Elaine, a woman famed for defying death on ageless celluloid, is, on the face of it, a perfect vehicle for Watkins’s concern with ...”

“... Park, Moscow and the sables let loose in the snow on Staten Island at the end – ‘black on white, black on white, and then gone’ – there are connections of cause and effect such as few crime novels have ever had to cope with. Gorky Park is a long novel because it tries to deal as fully with Moscow as Simenon’s ...”

“... copy of V.R. Lang: Poems & Plays, with a Memoir by Alison Lurie. The cover sports a black and white photograph of Lang looking soulful in a harlequin costume – a picture presumably taken during one of her performances for the Poets’ Theatre of Cambridge.Lurie’s memoir recreates the fervent excitement around the activities of this avant-garde ...”

“... their ends: riots and strikes often put down by gunfire, guerrilla uprisings, the murder of white settlers, the deportation and resettlement of whole populations, atrocities committed by colonial police forces.Patel’s point is that visions of the British Empire, insofar as they became coherent in the 19th century, were as ...”

“... he fell down a ravine and lost consciousness (he had a heart condition), but Washington is a very white state, and some of his friends and family suspected racist foul play. At the time I doubted this; now I’m not so sure. One of his friends told a reporter that he hadn’t packed any provisions because he was only ‘going out for a couple hours … sort ...”

“... available online), features some seventy objects by Tompkins, most of them hung vertically against white walls like tapestries or modernist paintings. It is a studiously dignified presentation that highlights the striking optical effects of her works, as in the showstopper String (1985) with its luscious, undulating strips of velvet and velveteen. The piece ...”

“... the absence of chimneys, there was always a chance of spotting a figure in a red cloak with a big white beard. The Buddhists had their own great festival, Vesak, which threw Christmas and saint’s-day processions into the shade: paper lanterns and archways richly decorated with pictures of the life of the Buddha, vividly described here, and notably the ...”

“... they sing with solemnity, yet cheerfully, Contentedly, though one by one They die. One by one his white birds Falter, and fall, out of the sky. ‘Heard sadly, but not sad’ is one of Grigson’s unfinical precisions. Having got it right, as if at the first attempt, he lets it alone. The poem seems to allude to the swans in the second stanza of Walter de la ...”

“... when World War Two began, so I followed its fortunes with the simple patriotic pride and black-and-white morality which belongs to childhood. Since my father was in the Air Force (as a musician who prudently avoided going up in an aeroplane even once), I took a special interest in that arm of the Services, became a fairly adept plane-spotter, and operated an ...”

“... was going on in Trumpworld than the people they were investigating had. As the former Trump aide Michael Caputo said on CNN after emerging from his interview with Mueller’s team, ‘I think they know more about the Trump campaign than anyone who ever worked there.’ Another irony is that some of the people who ended up getting indicted as a result of the ...”

“... diasporic circles. The Jamaican poet Mutabaruka responded with his own performance poem, ‘White Man Country’, whose central refrain Johnson quoted in a piece in the Guardian in 2005: ‘it no good fi stay inna white man country too long.’ The piece is collected in Time Come, a selection of Johnson’s prose from ...”

“... who might be figures from the play, appear bound together by lines gouged in the dirty white paint – ‘modern cave paintings’, in the words of one contemporary critic. Themerson often included an upside-down figure representing herself in her paintings – as elemental a metaphor for the émigré experience as you could hope for. If her ...”

“... you lose it? Not just language, but it. It.’ The space between their sense of a duty to a White who has endured such misfortune, and their response to one who looks, smells and behaves like a Black, is the screen on which the nature of racism is projected. But Malouf is more deeply concerned with the relation of humankind to the Australian ...”

“... THE GOVERNMENT BELIEVES IN GOD – WHY DON’T YOU? a preacher was flanked by two young women in white spandex bodysuits with wings on their backs. More angels were roaming the floor. Queues at the signing booths led to authors of romance novels. The displays suggested that people want to know how to get along with their spouses, attend to their children’s ...”