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“... of tribal or personal property, but on an interlocking network of ‘ways through’. What the white men saw as the meaningless habit of ‘Walkabout’ was a kind of bush-telegraph stock-exchange, spreading news of commodities and availability among peoples who never saw each other, and might even be unaware of each other’s existence. Since goods were ...”

“... look compounded of stage flats and wizened textures picked out in brass-rubbing black, ceiling white, royal blue and pillarbox red. Here was a love of the notionally unspoilt, a harking back to George V Georgian and, ideally, to the Georgian of Georges IV, III and II, not to mention the Edwardian of Edward the Confessor. Steeped in the notion of things ...”

“... the celebrated three-volume History of Jamaica, first published in 1774 and never out of print. (Peter Fryer described Long as the ‘father of English racism’ in Staying Power, his classic study of Black people in Britain from 1984.) I would see Clare and also make a final visit to Lucky Valley, Long’s plantation in Clarendon. Would this mark the end ...”

“... Instead, the Democrats pulled off the strongest midterm showing by a party occupying the White House in two decades. While they lost the House, the Republican majority is wafer-thin. Most of the candidates backed by Trump lost – including, crucially, the election-denying secretary of state candidates. And the Democrats held on to their majority in ...”

“... By the same token, Britishness of the Ulster kind – Orange parades and kerbsides painted red, white and blue – seems demonstrative and stridently un-British. To the summer visitor from Britain who pulls off the ferry at Larne, the proliferation of Union Jacks along roads and at roundabouts is alienating. Unintentionally perhaps, the puffed-up ...”

“... One may ask of Ms Ford’s book, rather as Alice asks of the White Knight’s poem: ‘What is it called?’ The title on the jacket is ‘Men’; the title on the title-page is Men. The jacket is the part of a book where publishers most candidly make known their views. Publishing contracts specifically reserve to the publisher the right to determine its appearance, unilaterally if necessary ...”

“... exits from another. His failure to spot Cairo will very nearly prove fatal. Since Cairo is Peter Lorre at his most flamboyant, you would have to be quite far gone in self-congratulation not to notice him. Spade has failed to understand that a corridor is less a space than a channel of communication through which people, things and messages pass in both ...”

“... hand, the crucial element of his art, his treatment of colour, cannot be reproduced in black-and-white illustrations; and, perhaps worse, even the best and technically most advanced colour plates necessarily distort and impoverish the rich harmonics of his colour schemes. On the other hand, the sheer splendour, liveliness and immediacy of Titian’s ...”

“... than Lancashire people, and it gets me down. Six thefts from the unit in the time we are here. Peter the caterer parks his van every night on St George’s Plateau, a well-lit spacious place in the centre of the city. Every night someone tries to break in. At breakfast in the hotel I ask for some brown toast. The waiter, a boy of 16 and as thin as a ...”

“... but named after a real one. His uncle is the American millionaire Pierpont Morgan, who owns the White Star Line, which in turn owns the Titanic. Morgan is an orphan. His father died before he was born, his mother three years after. She was a French girl, name unknown, who worked in a café and once sat for Cézanne. His father’s exact identity is not ...”

“... to say that these three are ‘well-known anthropologists’ is a bit like saying that Vanna White is a well-known lexicographer. To be fair, each of them did something that was a genuine contribution to anthropology, but the rest was docudrama and self-promotion. The discipline seems particularly vulnerable to this form of exhibitionist exuberance, and ...”

“... times life size, a tiny rosebud, its fragility compounded by its position off centre in a wide, white space. There are none of the trompe l’oeil shadows often used by traditional flower painters, and images shift in their relation to the frame, often asymmetrically placed, unusually angled or seeming to extend beyond the picture. Tulip (Red and ...”

“... hat (he works in the hospital canteen) and her sister, in a dark blue uniform and a little white hat (she also works in the canteen), and Carmen’s son, who is a medical student in the hospital, all lean over her bed, expressions of concern and patience on their faces. She doesn’t wake up. Six p.m. A man in a striped T-shirt rushes into our ward and ...”

“... real estate was cheap, plentiful and luring the likes of Tom McGuane, Tim Cahill, Jeff Bridges, Peter Fonda and the late Seymor Lawrence. Frontier towns like Livingston and Boulder Creek are today about as close as you can get to a nursing home for Sixties’ veterans and survivors of the more recent Hollywood filmscript wars – complete with a beanery in ...”

“... that produced such dire results in 19th- and 20th-century Europe, as Buruma and, especially, Peter Dale, author of The Myth of Japanese Uniqueness, have done? Or should we take it all with a pinch of salt? The position of those who take up an adversarial stance and invoke the direst of scenarios is fraught with difficulties. The Japanese can always ...”