“... reinterpretation whenever the hive challenged conventional wisdom. An early 17th-century expert, Richard Remnant, contended that beekeepers could use their knowledge of queen bees to control women. Butler was forced to accept the existence of the queen but frothed: ‘Let no nimble-tongued sophisters gather a false conclusion from these true premises.’ In ...”

“... see the creased, gentle and infinitely sad face of Albert Einstein – back-lit, his dishevelled white hair glowing like a saintly halo. Or the gaunt stick-figure of Robert Oppenheimer in his last years, hair close-cropped – a starving Buddha, worn down by political persecution and the atomic scientist’s ‘knowledge of sin’. Even now, the cover of A ...”

“... collapse of American belief in a utopian national destiny’ as Los Angeles shifts from a white to a non-white majority. ‘Magical dystopians’, on the other hand, fashion ‘alternative Los Angeleses with surreal topographies, genders and futures’. Where the Armageddonist imagines a final conflict, the magical ...”

“... the waist by its father, stood on the table, swaying among the ashtrays and empty cups. It wore a white sun hat, a green-and-white striped matelot vest, bulging pants frilled with pink lace and white ribbon, yellow ankle-socks and scarlet leather shoes. The pale blue circular bit of its ...”

“... Punk rockers looked ugly, partly because, being ill-favoured, gangly and for the most part poor-white geeks, they were to the manner born, and partly because they wanted to. They sounded ugly, partly because not many could play their instruments very well, partly because they were out of their heads most of the time, but mostly because they wanted to. The ...”

“... have flickering memories of television programmes glimpsed or devoured on our parents’ black and white TVs. Two in particular have stayed with me for more than five decades. First of all there was The Singing Ringing Tree, which I must have seen on one of its first BBC broadcasts in the mid-1960s. Subsequent DVD releases have revealed that, in its original ...”

“... A new history of empire, no longer either triumphalist or cast in the shades of black and white favoured by the post-colonialists, is beginning to be written. It assumes that the metropolis and the colonies were not self-contained realms (as the older ‘imperial history’ often assumed); it recognises that empires were made and ruled by individuals with often very different, even conflicting aspirations ...”

“... the seeds, covering them with more soil, watering them, labelling each pot in waterproof ink on a white plastic tag, crossing each item off the list on the clipboard as the correct number was completed: 40, 50, 60 lines at the end of a day. It was like a dream version of writing: all you had to do was state your fantastical intentions – Leeks (Blue ...”

“... off without anaesthetic. A few days later, he suffered another blow: the death of his infant son, Richard. Although the wound healed well, the recovery would have been gruelling. All the while, the invoices and orders kept piling up. At the time of his surgery, Wedgwood styled himself ‘Potter to Her Majesty’ Queen Charlotte and was on the way to becoming ...”

“... Proclamation is just a legality when an employer can make a debt slave out of anyone, Black or white, who comes in good faith to work. Living on the plantation means buying an army surplus tent, blankets, utensils, dishes and daily rations, all of which gives you a negative balance to start with. Any contingency that arises – your neighbours steal your ...”

“... Jerusalem. What happens to these fellers in the den or jungle of oblivion where the black becomes white, the white becomes the red is nobody’s business.The story itself is rather aimless and mostly intended to demonstrate the author’s hipness. Mabel the Sweet Honey that Poured Away, by contrast, is the sad tale of a ...”

“... where distinctions between hand and machine are difficult to recover. In different ways, Warhol, Richard Hamilton, James Rosenquist, Gerhard Richter and Sigmar Polke produce a related conundrum of the painterly and the photographic; it is a prime characteristic of Pop art at its best.Lichtenstein’s work abounds in manually made signs of mechanically ...”

“... War”’.Kowol takes issue with that claim. He begins not with a politician but with John Baker White, a reserve officer in the London Rifle Brigade before the war and then a serving officer. Baker White kept a journal, a curious but fascinating document which was published in 1942 as A Soldier Dares to Think. He was ...”

“... before seen in this country. At times, indeed, it was going up by a thousand a month, which, as Richard Tilt, the director general of the Prison Service, has pointed out, requires a new prison every three weeks to house the intake. If Howard’s Crime (Sentencing) Bill goes through Parliament, it will add between 10,000 and 30,000 prisoners to the present ...”

“... marble sculpture looming above, ‘It was the second worst thing Lincoln ever watched.’Internal White House documents predict three thousand American deaths a day by the end of May. The president tweets: ‘Getting great reviews, finally, for how well we are handling the pandemic.’ He retweets that the Trump Turnberry golf course has been named by Golf ...”