“... 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 ...”

“... As the hearing concluded, the judge walked across to the prosecuting counsel (they were both white men). ‘How much would you like me to give him? Six months? Big fine?’ The prosecutor shook his head. ‘No, Jim, he couldn’t pay. We’d be OK with a couple of months and confiscating his printing press like we did last time.’ The judge did what he ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... dignity and self-respect, and thinks they have a case against American society – but thinks the white student radicals were just spoilt and ungrateful kids, peeing on the carpet that welcomed them. One of these delinquents, famously photographed during the occupation smoking a cigar, with his feet on the university president’s desk, later called to ask ...”

“... back the frontier of magic, and in doing so provided some clues how to distinguish white magic from black, the honest mystery from the dishonest one’, he writes as one sympathetic to magics, but the word ‘honest’ locates him in just the tradition Thompson was talking about. Davie spoke of the later 18th century as possessing the ‘will ...”

“... into an ideology, neutralising living questions, and flattening them into the equivalent of the White Paper. And, yes, I admit that I want my Hamlet critics to have at least some sense of sex and violence, some power to evoke what Empson, in his 1953 essay, called Hamlet’s ‘crazy magical behaviour’. Various doubts creep in about the account of the ...”

“... treading on my tail’), Humpty Dumpty’s little fishes who would not listen to advice and the White Knight’s old man who hunts for haddocks’ eyes among the heather bright, and sets limed twigs for crabs. Can the English genius for nonsense really be explained simply by the fact that this is an island, set in what was until quite recently a ...”

“... for her ‘in the shadow like a thief’, hoping to steal his goodnight kiss:She was wearing a white cloth dressing gown, her admirable loosened black hair, containing all the gentleness and all the power of her nature, and which survived for so long like an unconscious vegetable growth of ruins that she protected tenderly at the cost of her happiness and ...”

“... cordillera vibrates in the distance at the edge of the plain, a bucolic scene complete with the white spirits of whirling plastic bags and the spasmodic craziness of driven cattle. Black wisps of ash float down as the sugar plantations, the dominant force in the valley, owned by a tiny handful of whites, insist now on burning some of the crop before harvest ...”

“... was a simple affair in an unassuming ‘colonial style’; in fact, it was modelled on the White House. She modestly recalls someone addressing her as ‘the most intelligent and responsive person I’ve ever met’. From her own account, she impressed Einstein, charmed Göring and captivated Shaw. Often she seems to be providing a textbook example of ...”

“... her lavish picture biography of her father: without illustration, alone in the middle of a large white space. On the facing page is a colour photograph of two men in a restaurant after a meal. Camus is smiling, a finger touching his chin; the other man, Michel Gallimard, seems about to smile. No scene could be more relaxed. The previous page shows a car ...”

“... from what Persian print, from what arcane region of nights and days enclosed in yesterday, did the white deer come, the one I dreamed this morning? There’s a touch of the strained ripio in the rather uncalled for word encierra – why, except for the rhyme with Inglaterra, would our yesterdays lock time up rather than just contain it? – but the ...”

“... in places like Germany and France people still tend to drop to their knees before sages with white beards.This is gross, but not different in substance from what Elizabeth Costello’s sister, a nun in Africa, tells her about the value of literature: ‘I do not need to consult novels to know what pettiness, what baseness, what cruelty human beings are ...”

“... has since been reported that Downing Street is proposing a ‘Kyoto-lite’ agreement, whereby the White House would simply admit that climate change is a problem. In Canada, where I live, greenhouse gas emissions need to fall to 6 per cent below 1990 levels if we are to meet our Kyoto commitments. Canadian emissions have been rising steadily; to reach the ...”