“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... and receives a letter from Lindbergh on the occasion. She is very happy to be invited to the White House when Ribbentrop comes to visit. Mr Roth leaves his job with Metropolitan Life Insurance rather than be transferred to Kentucky. Philip tries to run away from his collapsing world, and is kicked in the head by a horse – and, worse still, saved by a ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... in one of the armchairs and watched the ghostly shadows of coconut palms swaying on the room’s white plaster walls. In this room the hours would accumulate like grains of sand until they buried him.’ There is more, though. The King’s captors are (mainly) English, but the British Army which took his kingdom was largely Indian. Why would Indian soldiers ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... with an African American population living in a tiny ghetto and working in the homes of local white families. I grew up in Long Beach, but by 1968 had moved to the city. My parents, however, still lived there, and my outspoken mother arranged to see the city manager, a non-partisan administrator who exercised the authority normally enjoyed by an elected ...”

“... of touch’ (yeah) I am, will lose my seat, SDP wave of the future, usual balls. Actually, little White (Ambassador to Chile) isn’t so bad. A bit guarded, but that’s probably down to the secret FCO biog. which precedes me at all destinations. I am not getting on with his wife though. There is this certain type of woman who simultaneously demands that you ...”