“... Eavan Boland writes, ‘the attack of his syntax, his brat-pack stance as poète maudit.’ Michael Longley ‘felt overwhelmed and wanted to withdraw to a safe distance’. It was obvious that, as a young poet, he dominated the university scene. It was not so obvious that the university would dominate him. Of the Northern Irish poets who emerged in the ...”

“... the United States. There are obvious historical reasons why this should be so. Until 1776, most white inhabitants of the Thirteen Colonies shared religious and political ideas, patterns of consumerism, trade networks, secular culture, war efforts, as well as a king, with the people across the Atlantic. Consequently, Colonial American historians have long ...”

“... exceptions to this rule are George Osborne (Oxford, history), Boris Johnson (Oxford, classics), Michael Gove (Oxford, English) and a few, like Andy Burnham, Chris Grayling, Nick Herbert and Nick Clegg, who went to Cambridge. (Chris Huhne, incidentally, also read PPE at Oxford, but he is now in his fifties and therefore appears to be viewed by some Lib Dem ...”

“... Ghanaian independence. She saw ‘people running through the streets, looters carrying bales of white cotton that unendingly unfurled, streaming between them like a gushing river’. By the time Ghana became independent in 1957, she was away at school in England.In 1961, Busby took up a place to study English at the University of London, having convinced ...”

“... the narrator, Mike, says of the Peak District in March.From above you could see it lying pure white and motionless in the sun. Going down into it you found it grey, without comfort. A tree stood on the interface, bare and thorny. Inside, frost covered everything: before you had run a mile it had formed in your hair and beard, on the fibres of your ...”

“... off, and mixed bold and light, serifed and sans serif characters in single words. He left a lot of white space, words often ran up or down the page, and big type was often mixed with very small photographs. These devices slowed readers down. Readers who persevered became initiates. His layouts were a rejection of the conservative traditions which still govern ...”

“... I heard that the family of an American soldier killed in Iraq receives $12,000. I heard that the White House had deleted the chapter on Iraq from the annual Economic Report of the President, on the grounds that it did not conform with an otherwise cheerful tone. Within a week in January I heard Condoleezza Rice say there were 120,000 Iraqi troops trained to ...”

“... of human activity and contact, silting up in vast unchartable archives. In Repeated Takes, Michael Chanan has written a concise history of the technology that has wrought this change and the commercial and creative forces that have shaped it. His account is elegant and impressively well-informed. He ranges across the entire technical field, from ...”

“... were the only reality – not that one could believe them either. 16 January. Listening to Michael Heseltine justifying the £ 475,000 of Mr Brown, the chairman of British Gas, I remember Joe Fitton. During the war Dad was a warden in the ARP, his companion on patrol a neighbour, Joe Fitton. Somebody aroused Joe’s ire (a persistent failure to draw ...”

“... simply (or simplistically), black writers probably want to talk about the same sorts of things as white writers – love, loss, desire, power, their relationships with their personal, social and political communities, with their environment, with other texts. Each writer, whether white or black, will draw on a varying ...”

“... murmur of voices, and there were no faces behind the two gratings.The door opened and a man in a white jacket with brass buttons came in. He was carrying a basin and pushed down the door handle with his elbow. When he turned around, she saw it was Gert, but that didn’t particularly surprise her. She had gotten used to her world of terrors the way you get ...”

“... as the wives in our own circles, gentlemen hosting dinners served by servants wearing white cravats’.Less than 3 per cent of the very rich in Edwardian Britain (those leaving estates of more than £100,000) were Jews, but attacks on the ‘new plutocracy’ were often antisemitic in nature and to be Jewish attracted a particular opprobrium. This ...”

“... Confessions of Nat Turner, as racist and perverted, Genovese carried on a spirited defence of the white author from Virginia and his right to make artistic excursions into history. His next book, The World the Slaveholders Made (1969), moved him further along the right-veering road, with a critique of the maverick George Fitzhugh’s pro-slavery ...”

“... cuts’. A three-part companion videotape can be had. Still, when the Foreword by Michael Atiyah remarks that ‘some of the presentation requires a technical understanding of the mathematics and physics’ this can seem a grave understatement. Very little of the volume will be intelligible to the ‘broader audience’ to which Atiyah ...”

“... lists human fat among the ingredients of his wonder-working oglio del Scoto; in Webster’s White Devil, Isabella dreams of preserving the flesh of her rival, Vittoria, ‘like mummia’, while in The Duchess of Malfi, Bosola imagines the body of the woman he has come to kill as no better than ‘a salvatory’ (or ointment box) filled with ‘green ...”