“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... own terror and confusion as he drifted through the war zone, and it allowed Joan Didion, in The White Album, to weave details of her anxious upscale-Californian life into a startling account of the collapse of Sixties idealism. No one took the voice of the journalist further away from ‘neutral background’ (or seemed less able to stop himself doing ...”

“... his aspect. The surf flew in all directions about him, and his course towards us was marked by a white foam a rod in width, which he made with the continual violent thrashing of his tail; his head was about half out of water, and in that way he came upon, and again struck the ship. This time the bow was stove in, and the whale, pumping its tail in a froth ...”

“... returned, anchoring the Emma in the bay of Naples while the battle raged in the city. He wore a white costume, bombarded the city with revolutionary proclamations from his own printing press, distributed guns, and set his on-board tailors to sew red shirts for Garibaldi’s Thousand. When Naples fell, he made no effort to conceal his delight at the collapse ...”

“... makes the point about the crucial role of topography, institution, description, naming: one empty white room after another, each of them different, and each of them revealing. A space cooled by an air-conditioner that is recycling water from the morgue where the corpses of victims of Mexico’s drug war are washed (Air, 2003, by Teresa Margolles) gives a very ...”

“... When she became first lady in 1993, she demanded and obtained an office in the West Wing of the White House, the space formally given over to politics, not in the East Wing, which is ostensibly social and domestic. No less against all precedent, it was from here – the headquarters of America’s head of state – that she campaigned successfully to be a ...”

“... the book version (published in 1986) appears in one of the later photographs, covered in lines of white powder. In the introduction, Goldin writes that ‘if each picture is a story, then the accumulation of these pictures comes closer to memory, a story without end.’ The last photographs in the slideshow point to endings: rooms emptied of people, an open ...”