“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... with? If a musician listening to a tape can tell whether the fingers on the keys are black or white, should one tremble to acknowledge that the live voice, instantly distinguishable as male or female, leaves its imprint on the page? Russian is a language in which, given the laws of grammatical concordance, the lyrical ‘I’ must declare its gender all ...”

“... Richard Purdy (‘incapable of psychological insight into sexual matters’) and Michael Millgate (‘prim’), the devoted Hardy scholars who have given us studies of the work, an edition of the letters and several biographies. In an argument never explicitly stated in the book itself, but proclaimed in the press release and summarised on ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Before he enters the sacred area around Mecca, a man dons the ihram, a robe composed of two white sheets – no special dress is prescribed for women pilgrims. The Kaaba in Mecca is an approximately cubical building with a black stone set in silver in one of its corners. The pilgrims circumambulate the Kaaba seven times. Then they run backwards and ...”

“... down being Irish.’ Meantime history went on. ‘Prexy had lunch with Roosevelt on a tray in the White House, 3.2 beer became legal, and a repeal of the Volstead Act was promised ... I feel doubtful about the names of Lenin and Trotsky: when did they enter my consciousness?’ Living miserably with Johnsrud in the vacation from Vassar, Mary was none the less ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”