“... called Animal, a dog called Badger, a man called Ratty, and Swampy digging his famous tunnel. A white Rasta is cleaning dishes with the ashes of a cooking fire. Someone passes round a peacepipe filled with motherwort and hash. Rats gnaw through sleeping bags and rucksacks. A mother wipes snot off her child’s face with her sleeve. ‘Great ...”

“... In another story from Where I Live Now, Berlin’s most recent collection, the narrator is a young white male en route from the city to the county jail: After a long climb you come to a valley in the hills. The land used to be the summer estate of a millionaire called Spreckles. The fields around the county jail are like the grounds of a French castle. That ...”

“... the how. Greta’s opinions are dependably unwoke. She quips that her dog’s fur has turned white from seeing ‘the souls of dead slaves’. She assumes that her landlady’s adopted Nicaraguan son is the gardener and talks to him ‘like a dog’ (a ‘bad habit’, she allows). She refers to bees as ‘Japanesey’ for their ‘kamikaze’ habit of ...”

“... may consider every cloud a lakeTransmogrified, its character unselfed,At once a whale and a white wedding cakeBellowed into conspicuous ectoplasm.It is a lake’s ghost that goes voyaging.The book received measured but disappointing reviews (‘many of the poems have very little content, emotional or otherwise’; ‘all is craftsmanship held up for our ...”

“... as children to escape racial violence: Gordon, the Robert Charles riots of 1900, in which a mob of white Southerners murdered dozens after an African American man shot a police officer who had asked what he was doing in a mainly white neighbourhood; Croll, the Odessa pogrom of 1905, in which more than four hundred Jews were ...”

“... there occurred in Harlem such a flowering of music, dance, theatre and painting as to change white American perceptions of African American artistic expression. In a little over a decade, more books by black Americans appeared in print than had been published in the entire history of black American writing. In December 1923, Opportunity, the mouthpiece ...”

“... episode was burned in Disney animators’ memories from three years before the release of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937), the first ever feature-length animation and Walt’s personal masterpiece. (Biographies of Disney chart a long decline after this peak, despite endless new achievements.) Disney was 33 years old, and the studio still an ...”

“... Richard Branson​ is the mirror image of a Russian oligarch. This is not to say that where they are bad, he is good. If even half the things in Tom Bower’s new biography are true, Branson is far from being good. He is playing the same game as his Russian counterparts, but it’s the looking-glass version. Where they do their best to avoid the glare of publicity, he thrives on it ...”

“... happened, his fate wasn’t decided by a jury, but instead became enmeshed with the debacle at the White House and the scandal surrounding the Republican Party’s burglary of the offices of the Democratic National Committee in the Watergate office building. Nixon was never enthusiastic about using legal means to try to stop the New York Times from publishing ...”

“... alters the angle of her body, making it less weighty, less obscure, more available. It softens the white orb of the gas light, effaces the scratched sparks of light. The fingerprints that register Degas’s own bodily presence disappear. Yet the visible plate mark in the extended pastel is a reminder of the far darker image below. Starker still is the ...”

“... in which Mephistopheles encourages Faust to dance with her. The episode intrigued artists. Richard Westall exhibited Faust and Lilith at the Royal Academy exhibition in 1831. His Lilith is a naked, milky-skinned babe, with rosy-red lips and pert breasts, her modesty obscured by a piece of ...”

“... drawings and photographs. Architecture is the main focus, represented both in archival images and Richard Pare’s remarkable photographs from the 1990s and 2000s; there is also a selection of works by artists such as Rodchenko, Popova, Lissitzky and others, demonstrating the extent to which the concerns of the different branches of the arts were intertwined ...”

“... a self-advertisement worthy of a base politician. Archigram was a reaction to the purity of the white orthogonal architecture of the 1920s and early 1930s championed by Nikolaus Pevsner, the most conservative of progressives, who described English architecture of the 1950s as ‘not the functionally best solution, nor an economically justifiable ...”

“... the great aloneness together like they were in some B-grade movie’). Settlements – aboriginal, white or a mixture of both – regularly gave her a respite from the labours of her trek, and once she flew back to Alice Springs from some airstrip in order to consult the vet. But eventually she wended her way across half Australia, even if the last fifty miles ...”

“... on the composition of a particular fashion shot – a model walking towards him on a black and white marble floor in Versailles while a colonnade recedes behind her – he shrugged aside the compliment: ‘No, it was just there.’ ‘It’ being the shot, coming amicably towards him. He had, he claimed, remained ‘an incorrigible little boy’. His ...”