“... for Jeanne Dielman, was that of her parents’ home: ‘glossy tiles in a brighter shade of white’, ‘modern and functional furniture’, a glass coffee pot, a fireplace with fake logs, vases placed on doilies, nesting tables. This is where the nouveau roman influence ends. The woman of the title has left her husband and tells her neighbour ...”

“... something has changed in our relation to Abstract Expressionism. Not so long ago, on entering the white-walled room in a major museum housing the Pollocks, the Stills, the Rothkos and the Newmans, you could easily persuade yourself that here was the culmination of many things. Here, on these outsized canvases, the moment was recorded when New York muscled out ...”

“... acquired not only the language of political discourse, but also the famous riding-habit – white, black or bloodred – in which she sweeps through the imagination of her contemporaries and of romantic historians; at some stage, this neglected, abused little girl puts on her plumed hat and picks up her pistols. What was she then – a feminist ...”

“... the time, who lives in a clapboard hideaway in Connecticut and has an English actress wife called Claire. The other also appears to have the name Philip Roth on his passport, and looks enough like Roth I easily to be mistaken for him. Roth II is an American Jew from Chicago who worked as a private detective until becoming ill with cancer, one symptom of which ...”

“... ad hominem tactics are catching. Polemics are necessarily manichean: all-or-nothing, black and white, with facts manipulated or ignored. Television, especially in France, can turn good sellers into best-sellers, but it is not true that publishing houses are run on instant successes, or that the middle-selling titles have disappeared. In fact, it is with ...”

“... topical image of the RAF roundel’. It’s a patriotic emblem, especially when viewed in the red, white and blue of Technicolor, but the Archers was notable for its use of Pressburger’s fellow exiles: the German Alfred Junge, whom Powell called ‘the greatest art director that films have ever known’; the Polish composer Allan Gray (whose real name was ...”

“... The Fifth Year Marili glimpses a beggar from the window of the attic, where she has unearthed a ‘white porcelain cake basket’. ‘Grandfather had talked to her so often about hidden treasures, and now she knew at last what it was like to have found one,’ she thinks. She picks it up and is suddenly overcome by a longing to see the beggar’s face. When ...”

“... needed the US to come into the war? And because a trickle of brave tots with funny accents and white ankle-socks might melt American hearts? The actress Claire Bloom, who went to the States at the age of ten, describes in her autobiography how she was sent out to raise money for war relief by singing a nauseating little ...”

“... song cycles such as Poèmes pour Mi, dedicated to his first wife, the composer and violinist Claire Delbos, there are glimmering passages worthy of Debussy. But if Debussy’s more impressionistic compositions are evocative of shadows, water and sunken cathedrals, Messiaen’s music conjures intense light, strong colours and hard edges. His ...”

“... 9835. This created the Federal Employee Loyalty and Security Program, a decision, as Truman’s White House counsel Clark Clifford later admitted, driven by the prospect of the 1948 election and not by any security menace: ‘We did not believe there was a real problem. A problem was being manufactured.’ Truman himself, in private correspondence, said ...”

“... out what they saw as the seeds of subversion.The Abuelas became immediately recognisable by the white cloth nappies they wore as kerchiefs around their heads to their first protests. These were quickly replaced by white handkerchiefs with the names of the missing embroidered on them. The first time I visited Buenos ...”

“... one-off benefit performance of Presumption at the Theatre Royal, Birmingham. Lacking sufficient white canvas to allow Peake’s avalanche ending, Bunn decided to repaint a large canvas elephant left over from a performance of Thalaba the Destroyer earlier that year; on the night, a stage carpenter in the flies let go too soon, as the Birmingham Spectator ...”

“... Katherine Mansfield’s ‘plagiarism’ of this story (a transgression for which, according to Claire Tomalin, she was blackmailed by her former lover, Florian Sobienowski) differs dramatically from the Garnett version. Whereas Garnett is everything a good translator should be, the ideal blend of saint and valet. Mansfield obtrudes everywhere, as an author ...”

“... reduced to ‘fundamentalist screwballs’ by Bob Ingle in the Atlanta Constitution on 23 January; Claire Sterling in the Washington Post of 23 January argued that the Iran story was an aspect of ‘Fright Decade I’, the war against civilisation by terrorists. For Bill Green on the same page of the Post, ‘the Iranian obscenity’ raised the possibility ...”

“... Acker photographed brilliantly, especially in the shots taken by Robert Mapplethorpe: that soft, white face, with big, round eyes in the cheeks of a chubby cherub; that soft, white skin, pierced and pinched and hyperextended with hooks and rings and belts and dumb-bells: Acker was lifting weights long before lifting ...”