“... the previous year that ‘sometimes you remind me of a gentleman in full evening dress and white gloves attempting to put something right with the kitchen plumbing without soiling his attire.’ It comes as no surprise when the great man announces that ‘Edimbourg is nearer to being my spiritual home than is Glasgow.’ Yet one of the many strengths ...”

“... literary era dominated by heap big novelists now facilely grouped as a cetacean school of Great White Males (Styron, Norman Mailer, James Jones, John Updike, Saul Bellow, Gore Vidal, J.D. Salinger, Joseph Heller, the recently retired Philip Roth), whose ghostly father and bearded Neptune disturbing the liquor cabinet deep into the night was Ernest ...”

“... ascribed jokes and smart sayings to well-known figures such as the poet John Skelton or the fool Richard Tarleton. Jest-book-style anecdotes were often transcribed alongside more serious quotations in manuscript notebooks compiled by individual readers. So in 1601, the lawyer John Manningham recorded in what’s usually called his ‘diary’ (though really ...”

“... might nominate Trakl, Laforgue, Keats and Shelley (I don’t think I breathed while I was reading Richard Holmes’s Shelley: The Pursuit all those years ago); for a rare, artful blending of long and short, one can’t do better than Rimbaud and Hölderlin; and for the latter, Hamsun, Yeats, Shaw – and Bunting. Incidentally, or maybe not, Bunting also shows ...”

“... in Haddam, a town ‘as straightforward and plumb-literal as a fire hydrant’, where ‘tall, white-haired, razor-jawed old galoots from Yale with moist blue eyes and aromatic OSS backgrounds’ run the local show. ‘If you lose all hope,’ he says, ‘you can always find it again.’ And you sense that both he and ...”

“... until they have ripped the guts out of these decent Victorian villas to turn them into models of white and modish minimalism.5 March. On my walk I pass the Primrose Hill Community Library, which is closed to borrowers today but open for children, who throng the junior library, some of them sitting with an adult presumably learning to read, others in groups ...”

“... and a secret language (Senzar), the seven Dhyan-Chohans and seven subraces, the Grand White Brotherhood and the Lords of Karma, the Hyperboreans, Lemurians and Atlanteans. Theosophists did not read this part, but were attracted by the society’s benign general aims of uniting religions and promoting brotherhood. As Theosophy prospered and ...”

“... which turned upstanding Middle Americans towards conservatism. Liberals themselves tend to blame a white backlash against their efforts to secure racial justice. Doing good, they believe, did them in. There is some truth in each of these explanations. H.W. Brands, a prolific scholar of modern American history, adds his own contribution to the list. In this ...”

“... British intelligence agencies in the Investigatory Powers Tribunal (where he was represented by Richard Hermer KC before his appointment as attorney general), alleging that they were complicit in his torture.In exchange for the men pleading guilty and agreeing not to bring any further appeals, the US agreed not to pursue the death penalty (Mohammed’s deal ...”

“... presaging lunch at Marshall and Snelgrove’s and tea at Fortnum’s’. Instead ‘girls with white faces and heavily kohled eyes hurried out towards Praed Street’ – the book is best read with a streetfinder close to hand – ‘as if hastening to appointments with abortionists in seedy consulting rooms behind the Edgware Road’. Alas, times have ...”

“... held court alone, as Syberberg’s chilling cinematic portrait of her attests. Hitler and Richard Strauss, Toscanini and Houston Stewart Chamberlain came there, as well as a whole host of lesser figures, sycophants, geniuses, philosophers, charlatans, and professional Wagnerians of every stripe and calibre.One says all this about the bewildering ...”

“... connects Los Angeles proper to the even more suburban San Fernando Valley, much was written about Richard Meier’s architecture and Robert Irwin’s gardens. Remarkably little was written about the parking garage, though it’s the first structure you encounter on arriving at the Getty. (Theoretically, you could take a bus there, but this is, after all, a ...”

“... fool who can make a bad species and worse genera is a “Naturalist”.’ And another biologist, Richard Owen, made light of herbarium work as ‘the attaching of barbarous binomials to dried foreign weeds’. Partly because of its association with more general economic and cultural concerns, partly because it was so widely conceived as merely ...”

“... as social body, as spectacle. It would be hard to credit the resulting confusion in the Reagan White House between the personal and the political, the historical and the imaginary, were not the evidence offered by the President and his circle so compelling. Guts and Glory portrays Oliver North, who enacted the anti-Communist part of Reagan. For the ...”

“... The ‘white years’ of German history – the period between the end of the war and Adenauer’s first government of 1949 – were notable for two blank spaces in the national consciousness. The first was the space left by community spirit: in the material circumstances that followed on the bombing of Germany’s cities and the unconditional surrender of the German Armed Forces, Volksgemeinschaft, the centrepiece of National Socialist ideology and propaganda, gave way to individual interest, to the spirit of ‘everyone for himself ...”