“... personhood, their human individuality, to be foregrounded in these novels, they must be white and have a surname that is either Anglo-Saxon, Anglo-Norman, Scandinavian or Celtic: Marlowe, Riordan, Sternwood, Ohls, Morgan, Conquest, Potter, Petersen, Haviland. A small number of characters with names that are vaguely Euro-Catholic are grudgingly ...”

“... timid. They resemble nothing so much as nervous Victorian dabblings with Mr Sludge the medium. A white-coated psychologist was in attendance. Huxley’s main contention is that ‘religion and alcohol do not and cannot mix.’ Mescalin is ‘much more compatible’. Thousands of eager ‘experimenters’ subsequently took their trip through the magic ...”

“... the neurotic waywardness and vulgar infamies of California as simply ‘good material’. The White Album deals with the late Sixties and early Seventies. During these menacing years Miss Didion lived with her husband and daughter in a large house in Hollywood, at the heart of what a friend described as a ‘senseless-killing neighborhood’. Across the ...”

“... hearings, the Cold War). And Johns did muffle his subjects along with his gestures; his large White Flag (1955) is literally whited out. Might this intimate a ‘painting degree zero’ in line with the ‘writing degree zero’ posed by Roland Barthes against Sartrean commitment at around this time? ‘I can’t imagine my work being used to accomplish ...”

“... hot weather she pulls her window up as far as it will go and leaves it so, and her curtains, the white net of hotel room curtains are worn thin, I suppose, like the ones I have here, are fastened back so that she can get all the light and air there is … One evening lately I saw the old lady sitting at her window, facing west, or rather, facing the west ...”

“... possibility of a ‘life-size cold-cast bronze or copper statue of Elvis’ at £25,000. Pure white hand-polished busts of Elvis come in beautiful ‘marbelene’. Item G21 in the list is the Memorial Elvis Pillow, a tasselled affair inscribed in Victorian homily-Gothic lettering, God knew Elvis Was tired, so he Took him to Rest. The ‘Fantastic Elvis ...”

“... there no great women artists?’ was first put to Linda Nochlin in 1970 by the New York gallerist Richard Feigen. It was a genuine inquiry. He would love, he said, to show women artists. The problem was he couldn’t find any good enough. Stumped for an answer at the time, Nochlin continued to consider the question. Her response came a year later in the form ...”

“... eyes. The hair curling from under her blue hat was darkly red, her full lips more brightly red. White teeth glistened in the crescent her timid smile made.’ Brigid, an incredible spectacle in red, white and blue (she doesn’t translate well to black and white film) isn’t somebody ...”

“... science. Mid-to-late 19th-century Camemberts looked nothing like the slightly dusty, chalk-white product to which we are accustomed. Their rinds varied enormously: most commonly, they were bluish-grey with brownish-red spots, and, while white Camemberts became typical in the 1920s and 1930s, some were still coming ...”

“... a small painting of a boucherie in which the meat hanging outside shares the dull pink and grey-white tones of the doorframe and the road in the foreground; and a panel showing tourists on the beach, the tents and the sea related by a tinny blue, and the clouds created out of the colours of the sand and the women’s dresses. In these works, Sickert was ...”

“... permission. It was the first violation.When Diana drove to St Paul’s she was a blur of virginal white behind glass. The public was waiting to see the dress, but this was more than a fashion moment. An everyday sort of girl had been squashed into the coach, but a goddess came out. She didn’t get out of the coach in any ordinary way: she hatched. The ...”

“... defences of weaponised drones. Doubts multiply when we read that the ‘CIA had approval from the White House to carry out missile strikes in Pakistan even when CIA targeters weren’t certain about exactly who it was they were killing’. Before acknowledging that ‘every drone strike is an execution,’ Richard Blee, the ...”

“... the maiden speech for which he was instantly awarded the Garter. When I joined, I discovered that Richard Adrian is quite right: it is like a prep school. There are any number of corridors down which to get lost. Nobody tells you how to find the Gents, and you’re too shy to ask. The rituals are as arcane to the newcomer as they are familiar to the old ...”

“... and clemency (increasingly absent in his later years) in opposing and preventing a cruel White Terror were remarkable. His interest in science, however much that of an occasional dilettante and patron, was genuine and forward-looking, as was his promotion of shipbuilding and of the Navy. He fostered the arts. His bravery and humanity during the Great ...”

“... a report that prostitutes were carrying on in the black-out by shining a torch in the pocket of a white raincoat. The woman author of a war diary, who had felt guilty because her town had escaped bombing, was at last able to report a near-hit: ‘Never in my life have I experienced such pure and flawless happiness.’ Alert observation, hard facts, subjective ...”