“... like the walls of Kabul, made of warm, sagging, straw-flecked mud: they are rigid blocks of grey-white stone. Foreigners have consistently perceived this aspect of the city as – in the words of the French gem-hunter Jean-Baptiste Tavernier in 1640 – ‘not very handsome’, or, in the words of Bartholomew Plaisted in 1752, ‘very disagreeable to ...”

“... runs he used to chat to his competitors, which some took for friendliness, others arrogance. Both Richard Askwith and Rick Broadbent have gone through the archives and spoken to those who knew Zátopek – particularly his wife, Dana, an Olympic gold-medal-winning javelin thrower – in order to tell his story in unprecedented detail. Zátopek was born in ...”

“... translation. This is not to fault the 1950s translators: Jonathan Griffin for the first volume, Richard Howard for the second and third. (This new edition fails to give them credit.) Yet translating the sacred text of a foreign creed is fraught with difficulty. Thinking of France ‘in a certain way’ does not quite convey de Gaulle’s mystical opening ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”