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“... The mother plaits and twists her hair into a long braid and the two go out to harvest passing white whales; the son binds her with ropes to one of the whales, and it drags her into the sea. According to Rasmussen, ‘she did not come back, and was changed into a narwhal … and from her the narwhals are descended.’ One of the earliest written accounts ...”

“... panniers and stomachers. Frankland’s watercolour for 1793 captured the vogue for long folds of white fabric and a body beneath that was clearly no longer tightly corseted.In The Age of Undress, Amelia Rauser examines the fashion that burned brightly, if briefly, at the end of the 18th century. The trend was highly revealing. Breasts had already been on ...”

“... of the landscape and on patterns of population growth and migration. R.J. Olney and Alan Gilbert investigate those two bastions of the English landed establishment, the county constituencies and the Church of England; and Messrs Howell, Gray and Cullen survey agriculture, tenurial relations and politics on the Celtic fringe. Finally, the view shifts ...”

“... The recently opened Gilbert Collection at Somerset House includes a vast number of objects made by a meticulous technique of inlay known as micromosaic, in which tiny fragments of glass are assembled to form a picture – not always in the best possible taste. Mark Girouard’s biography of James Stirling is constructed by a similar procedure, an astonishing accumulation of small details, asides and memories building up to a portrait ...”

“... an artist of genius, Tony Cragg. If there’s another among that generation in Britain, it must be Gilbert and George, a pair of classic hedgehogs: everything they’ve done depends from that marvellous wheeze they had as students that a couple of artists could be living sculptures. Cragg is a fox, with a flow of invention that is dazzling and frightening in ...”

“... 1736 A small selection of astonishing self-portrait drawings, on view at the Courtauld’s new Gilbert and Ildiko Butler Drawings Gallery until 20 September, shows how, after he had turned 61, Richardson compiled a visual diary, regularly scrutinising his appearance by means of mirrors and from all angles, bewigged and unwigged, frontally and in ...”

“... interior of All Saints Church and Queen’s Old Hall; in London, he worked on the mansions of the Gilbert Scott, Flower and Howard families. He bought 186 Gwydir Street in 1886 with money he’d saved in his post office account and, with his wife, Mary Jane, and their three children, lived there until he died, in 1927. Transforming the interior of his own ...”

“... must have been Lola Montez.’ Admirers mentioned her air of refinement, her tapered fingers and white hands, her duchessy way of carrying herself. The Morning Post praised her ‘almost faultless’ foot and ankle. Some people spoke adoringly of her ‘mice teeth’, an attribute whose charms have not survived. Some of Lola’s other features were more ...”

“... where his artisan father practised his trade as a glover and ‘whittawer’ – a worker of white leather, typically kidskin, and thus a producer of those ‘kid gloves’ still proverbial for their softness. The product was upmarket but the production of it messy and pungent. When Shakespeare mentions a man with a ‘great round beard, like a ...”

“... the contemporary everyday); it has been called a model for Jacob’s Room (in its experiments with white space on the page), for Mrs Dalloway (as an account of a woman’s journey across a city in the course of a single day) and for Orlando (in its coded lesbian poetics). It has been celebrated as the first Cubist work in English, the first introduction for ...”

“... of lesbianism. Oh dear!’ Subsequent disclaimers never quite dispel the image of a cosy knot of white, straight, successful academic feminists disoriented by the encroachment of angry self-defining outsiders. From this parochial perspective, Gubar’s essays on African American art and lesbian writing come to seem like a tit-for-tat appropriation of the ...”

“... were rebelling against.’ Eugenides studied at Brown with John Hawkes and at Stanford with Gilbert Sorrentino, exacting experimentalists who were ‘against order on the whole and against storytelling’. By setting much of his new novel at Brown in the early 1980s, Eugenides returns to the time of the fall; by committing the novel unblinkingly to the ...”

“... these matters his new partner, who has stayed with him for the whole of his business life, Gordon White, boasted to a Sunday Mirror gossip columnist: ‘Why should I marry? I don’t need anyone to look after me. I’ve got a good housekeeper to darn my socks, sew on my buttons and cook my meals.’ White managed to ...”

“... that I could need £100. I’d go down there and he still wouldn’t pay me, and yet he’d have a white Rolls Royce with a chauffeur sitting outside waiting to take him wherever he wanted to go. But who says he paid the chauffeur? Not settling debts is hardly unheard of in Old Etonians. But Robert was a first-generation Etonian, and might conceivably have ...”

“... in his tribal village 600 kilometres from Johannesburg. They are all decent people – the two white liberals, their young children, the trusted servant, the peaceable villagers. All human instinct argues that this is not, after all, an impossible situation. Nadine Gordimer, in her unsparing new novel, suggests otherwise. Her recent Burger’s ...”