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“... older and tried hands: proven winners. As a cohort, novelists are MacArthur’s senior citizens. William Gaddis (1982) was awarded a fellowship at the age of 60, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala (1984) at 57, Susan Sontag (1990) at 59, Ernest J. Gaines (1993) at 60. Thomas Pynchon was a relatively young 51 when he won, but by 1988 already the author of his major ...”

“... at last meets his idol, the great writer Bergotte, he gets a terrible shock: instead of the ‘white-haired, sweet Singer’ of his imagination, he sees ‘a young man, uncouth, short, thickset and myopic, with a red nose shaped like a snail-shell and a black goatee’. The fantasy Bergotte vanishes, but the caricature that replaces him is not ...”

“... the prettiest name’), but quickly the images darken. Mangrove roots, ‘when dead’, ‘strew white swamps with skeletons’, and turtles ‘die and leave their barnacled shells on the beaches,/and their large white skulls with round eye-sockets/twice the size of a man’s’. In the poem’s second half, there are ...”

“... that the Hoovers were probably ‘mostly what they said they were’: one of the ‘oldest white families’ in town. Hoover has been well served by previous biographers, but online databases and genealogical tables have enabled Gage to provide the fullest account yet of his early life. Her Hoover had few friends, but was remembered ‘happily running ...”

“... and before those still lodging in the rectory were dispersed, I visited the house by invitation of William Bock, who acted as spokesperson for the collective. Will, as might have been expected under the circumstances, looked pale, convalescent, chilled. He hugged himself under a poncho of blankets, drawing up his legs on the sofa, before he launched into his ...”

“... the assumption that full participation in society required acceptance of the norms set by straight white males. Yet even as the public sphere grew more inclusive, the boundaries of permissible debate were narrowing. Critiques of concentrated power, imperial or plutocratic, became less common. Indeed, the preoccupation with racial and gender identity has ...”

“... the story of his early days in the West, and we flash back to a past which, as the film critic William Pechter observed, ‘to strange effect, is recognisably a set’. Monument Valley as an icon of the frontier was Ford’s creation; no maker of Westerns has done more with the landscape of the West, yet Liberty Valance has very little natural scenery, and ...”

“... Commons dining-room.I play Sillery, now 80, though I can’t say I adjust the acting to the age, a white wig doing most of the work. I am supposed to be entertaining, or being entertained by, a group of young MPs, my only line being: ‘I will mention your name to the Italian Ambassador. I’m dining with him tomorrow night at Diana Cooper’s.’ Most of the ...”

“... if only numerically – and it’s time America woke up to it; but apart from localised bouts of white nativist hysteria, such as that which gave rise to California’s anti-immigrant Proposition 187 in 1994, the Latino presence remains strangely invisible. This invisibility takes many forms, but underlying all of them is the fact that the United States has ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... sovereignty, free will, moral truth, reason – as exclusivist and self-serving creations of white, heterosexual bourgeois males. In the regime of deindustrialisation and globalised financial capitalism that followed the oil crisis of 1973, man would be increasingly deprived of his work ethic (and self-worth) and burdened by unprecedented professional ...”

“... conference convened to allow him to put his spin on the ‘interim report’ just published by the White House’s National Security Council (NSC), he also tried to sell the war in Iraq as a Manichean struggle against al-Qaida. ‘We can’t let al-Qaida gain safe haven inside of Iraq. My attitude is we ought to defeat them there so we don’t have to face ...”

“... a cousin and former lover of the once successful but now forgotten Victorian historical novelist William Ainsworth. The deadliness of Ainsworth’s prose is a running joke, and it enables several asides of the ‘don’t whatever you do write a historical novel’ kind, as well as various self-conscious observations about the horrors of literary ...”

“... understand the conduct of the others. A man to my left is absorbed in conversation with a grey and white bird. It looks as if he is instructing the creature – his fingers, like those of the rough theologian, are didactic. Are we at the moment in God’s scheme when the children of Adam teach the animals the names of things? Or is the man taking lessons from ...”

“... assumed. Aha, not an officer but a sergeant! Alas, he’d been given the wrong scent. One William Archer did indeed serve as a sergeant in the Somerset Light Infantry and he did win a DCM. In 1986, his grandson sent his photographs to the regimental archive. In 1987, the regimental secretary, Lt-Col Ronald Woodhouse, told Geoffrey Levy of the Daily ...”