“... emporium of wonders, or sociable nexus, in favour of Spartan purity. The unlikely father of the ‘white cube effect’ was Casper David Friedrich, whose studio’s one ornament was a T-square dangling from the wall, a reminder of honest German craftsmanship in keeping with his penchant for woodwork and frame-design. Of course, Friedrich’s brand of mystical ...”

“... was partly based on this episode. Improbably enough, one of the Wager’s sailors was called William Robinson Cruzoe – if he hadn’t deserted ship before it sailed, there might have been a real-life Crusoe among those marooned in the South Seas.Many of the Wager’s survivors later published detailed accounts of their experiences – for profit, to ...”

“... who commissioned Leutze’s painting, probably knew and had certainly read his fellow Bostonian, William Prescott, whose Conquest of Mexico was published in 1843, and whose concern about the legitimacy of the Spanish conquest ‘lies between every line of his three volumes’, as William Truettner puts it in an essay in ...”

“... volume of new poems, is aimed squarely at transcendence. The title has a humble and practical William Carlos Williams ring to it, but that is misleading. It is better understood as having been distilled from ‘I must be seeing things’, said seriously, and with a fair amount of stress on the ‘I must’. The greatest difficulty for the poet is how to ...”

“... in La Capponcina was privileged and lived between gardens and summerhouses with the old man, in white cotton gloves brought by Raymond, taking exercise by plying roses with secateurs. But it was neither sybaritic nor idle. At 77 he returned recurringly to the dictaphone with instructions to men producing a newspaper to his wishes. What is described here is ...”

“... as I did in the country of my skin, all the methods I used had to be acceptable to white observers.’Black Teacher was met with hostility when it first appeared. Gilroy was accused of boasting and of exaggerating the prejudice she had faced; for her part, she complained her account had been softened in the editing. In To Sir, with Love ...”

“... at work around him. This creates a much more rounded picture of Lawrence too. The chief ones are William Yale, representative in the Middle East of the disreputable Standard Oil Company of New York (and so of American capitalism); Curt Prüfer, ardent German nationalist, working to seduce the Arabs to the German side, who was later a convert to ‘the ...”

“... In a chapter on animals in his Description of England, the Elizabethan antiquary William Harrison told not one but two stories about Henry VII. ‘As the report goeth’, he wrote, the king had had all the mastiffs in England put to death because ‘they durst presume to fight against the lion, who is their king and sovereigne ...”

“... Their cheerful conversation was reassuringly at odds with their get-up (black hair, white faces, silver skulls dangling from their ears). I wondered whether they might see a connection between Hamlet’s nighted colour and their own style, but, being natives of Stratford-upon-Avon, they had been force-fed Shakespeare all their lives and heartily ...”

“... she was supported by writers and artists including Joseph Kosuth, Keith Sonnier, Sol LeWitt, William Wegman and Leandro Katz (who, with Ted Castle, produced Acker’s first ‘real’ books). She was, for a time, known only as the Black Tarantula; her work was fresh and defiant, and blended perfectly with the cultural mix of 1970s New York. The ...”

“... they separated within ten months. Three years after that, she took up with the architect Edward William Godwin. They did not marry, but had a daughter and son together, and the expense of their upkeep drove her back to the stage. Her performance as Portia in The Merchant of Venice drew her to the attention of Henry Irving, an emerging actor-manager who ...”

“... her (‘Janet also stepped in when a particular group bored Jackie, as did the coffee hour at the White House for the wives of the New York Stock Exchange members or the social for the International Council of Women’), but Pottker’s most telling sentence concerns that photograph of Jackie’s mother looking the other way while her husband ...”

“... published an essay which concluded that ‘lynching is the aftermath of slavery.’ A year later, William A. Sinclair, who was born into enslavement, published The Aftermath of Slavery, a Study of the Condition and Environment of the American Negro. Terrell and Sinclair used the term ‘aftermath’ to make the point that their own era was contiguous with the ...”

“... assurance, the nonchalant way he let the vinegar run from the chip-bag onto the breast of his off-white shirt. But I kept all this quiet knowing there were things he envied about me too. I think each of us treasured this envy, longing to know how the other had changed but disdaining to ask. His friend, Jamie, tells the narrator that he has seen the woman who ...”

“... lonely schoolboy from Christ’s Hospital. Through his study of the scientific work, Levere joins William Empson among others in defending the coherence of Coleridge and his metaphysics. Coleridge’s vision of a ‘dynamic’ German philosophy, pitted against Anglo-Gallic reductionism; his flirtation with chemistry ‘to improve his stock of ...”