“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... memories of the Nuremberg Trials by envisioning a future in which figures like Cardinal Ratzinger, William F. Buckley Jr and Jesse Helms would be held to account for the hatefulness of their pronouncements about people with Aids. ACT UP New York was founded in March 1987, but perhaps sparked as much as founded, thanks to the now-or-never rhetoric of the ...”

“... form of Post-Enlightenment rationalism with a mystic hope of social metamorphosis inherited from William Blake. Over the next fifty years Owen sought to realise his vision in a variety of ways – as a model factory employer, as the founder of socialist communities, as a patron of trade-unionism and workers’ co-operatives, and as the sponsor of a wide ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... at school, a jersey and skirt at training college, ‘my schizophrenic fancy dress’, a ‘white smock, white shoes and a starched cap’, things made of weird new fabrics such as ‘everglaze’, a longed-for skirt of ‘terylene’ with permanent pleats, a ‘dull green overcoat’, the slacks Sargeson preferred ...”

“... Van Dine’s famous aesthete-sleuth – polo player, expert in Chinese ceramics, former student of William James – whom Raymond Chandler regarded as ‘the most asinine character in detective fiction’, and on some level that’s probably the point. (‘I’m not Sherlock Holmes or Philo Vance,’ Marlowe says later on.) Even so, it’s surprising that ...”

“... for these dashing chaps, who, while they had the insouciant air of fighter pilots, sought the white rather than the right stuff. The cocaine literature of the era reflected these attitudes: Robert Sabbag’s Snowblind (1976) was a gonzo-inflected account of how one man, Zachary Swan, single-handedly turned southern California onto coke; and while ...”

“... be calling her the next Maria Callas.’AnnieLee goes back to her alter ego’s mansion in a white limo. For a minute and a half, it’s All about Eve, Y’All, with the wannabe singer trying on the star’s clothes and wondering how to be true to herself, even (or perhaps especially) if she doesn’t quite have a self. AnnieLee lies about her past and ...”

“... described a public figure as a homosexual, let alone defined him as one, let alone in an obituary. William Rees-Mogg had, apparently, decided that anything less would be anodyne. This same Mogg has written elsewhere of a psychic and political link between Maynard Keynes the homosexual and Keynes the promiscuous debaucher of the currency, tying this in turn to ...”