“... Cuban citizens needed official permission, in the form of the so-called tarjeta blanca, the ‘white card’, to travel abroad. It wasn’t as restrictive as is often claimed. Between 2000 and 2012, 99.4 per cent of applications for the white card were approved, and 941,953 Cubans travelled abroad: 12 per cent chose not ...”

“... about abstraction. He joined a London exhibiting group headed by Ben Nicholson, whose pure white reliefs were the nearest indigenous parallel to the work of Continental avantgardists such as Mondrian, and devised his own handsomely workmanlike ‘Constructions’. In 1935 Piper’s girlfriend Myfanwy Evans launched Axis, a review of ...”

“... they powered Thomas Malory’s 15th-century Morte D’Arthur, created the Victorian vogue for William Morris’s ‘Defence of Guenevere’ (1858) and Tennyson’s Idylls of the King (1859-85), and returned in T.H. White’s Once and Future King (1958) and the Disney movie based on it in 1963, with a dozen successors ...”

“... soon took up with the British security services too. The head of Scotland Yard’s Special Branch, William Melville, worked closely with the Okhrana’s top man in Paris, Petr Ivanovich Rachkovsky, whose many state-sanctioned crimes probably included overseeing the creation of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Morris thinks Melville wasn’t to know about ...”

“... she is able to sustain our interest in their dramas, pleasures, quarrels and sorrows long after ‘William’ (as Barker always calls him – even, irritatingly, ‘our William’) has ceased to write wonderful poetry. In fact, she manages to make an intriguing sub-narrative out of his wife’s and his sister’s ...”

“... self-help in the house but the only non-library book of autobiography was I Haven’t Unpacked by William Holt, who had got away from the dark, satanic mills by buying a horse and riding through England. The Armley library was at the bottom of Wesley Road, the entrance up a flight of marble steps under open arches, through brass-railed swing doors panelled in ...”

“... of course, the two recent books on Gerard Manley Hopkins, one by Robert Martin and one by Norman White, but there has been nothing comprehensive. There is now. In Robert Bridges Catherine Phillips tells us everything we could reasonably wish to know about his life. About his poetry there is more still to be said, but one of the merits of this book is that ...”

“... peremptory: ‘Eve he supposed had as much sense as I had and she wore no clothes at all!!!’ A white silk dress was duly ordered (Mr C. graciously agreed to pay) and arrived properly ‘high and longsleeved’ and then, ‘on the very day of the ball, was sent back to be cut down to the due pitch of indecency’. Jane’s country-mouse observations on the ...”

“... lifetime tenure, and sometimes that is a literal description: the ultra-conservative Chief Justice William Rehnquist died on the job in 2005 at the age of eighty, and so did his ideological ally Antonin Scalia in 2016, aged 79. More recently, the court’s indefatigable liberal standard-bearer, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, died in post aged 87, a mere six and a half ...”

“... was supposed to meet her, was late. When she did arrive she produced a particularly unflattering white satin dress, which she made Caroline change into, and then applied liberal quantities of rouge to the princess’s face. It was either this unfortunate first appearance (for Caroline, if no beauty, had her points), or the fact that she regarded washing ...”

“... certainty’. Some even saw in its climate of extremes the foundations of a higher civilisation. William Cronon, in his magisterial book Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West, refers to Alexander von Humboldt’s theory that great cities were possible only in regions with an average annual isotherm of about 50° F, and explains that ‘the ...”

“... he strode into the building and claimed the job, introducing himself as all-American ‘Harry White’. In his time off from the tie factory, Harry’s taste for magic grew into an obsession; and once the rest of his family had joined him in New York, he and his younger brother, Theo, nicknamed Dash, started working on an act together. Harry was ...”

“... of the anti-conformist, soon-to-be-hippy generation. It is of course an analysis solely of the white world; Erikson’s interest in American blacks came later. The time was ripe for all this. The pool of patients (including himself) from which Freud drew his theories may have been neurotic or traumatised, but most came from an established Jewish-bourgeois ...”

“... A publisher’s note explains that when William Golding died he had written two drafts of this novel, and was about to begin a third. The signs are that this might have been longer than the second, but not substantially different. Some necessary editing has been done, on the basis of notes made by Golding in his journal, and there is a page of typescript missing in the middle of the book ...”

“... all the young queen had more in common with her unpopular and self-indulgent uncles George IV and William IV than the fresh-faced appearance and the famous promise to ‘be good’ suggested. Courtiers and Victoria herself recorded tearful scenes and door slamming on her part and implacable calm, or the appearance of it, on Albert’s. Once he locked himself ...”