“... in front of the court itself, a timid-looking, hair-waxed gentleman stops for the cameras. It’s Peter Badge, the Chief Metropolitan Stipendiary Magistrate: the hearing will take place before him, and he will make the decision as to whether there’s a case to be tried or not. He looks like a little chaffinch. ‘Mr Badge,’ we are told later, ‘is ...”

“... knees towards the noise of the crickets. He sees no more of the post as he passes than a blur of white among a throng of his rivals. There is no one to tell him whether or not he has got up to win.’ A few weeks later, Clementia breaks a leg while training and Augustine puts her down. Now baptised, Jean confesses that she became pregnant on the night of the ...”

“... in the road with a fistful of windscreen wipers, trying to sell them to passing drivers. It was White City that day, the security designation for a place where incidents were already happening or likely to happen. That morning, four suicide bombers had attacked Karzai’s palace and we could still see the smoke. ...”

“... fourth position, but more naturally placed. She wears a loose gown draped crosswise with a white veil, a floating X over her heart. Coming out of the turn and moving in the direction of the camera, her arms melt open as her head falls back. The white column of her neck, the spade-like underside of her jaw, the lifted ...”

“... na Mara (‘shieling of the sea’) in Kilpheder (from the Gaelic Cille-pheadair, or ‘church of Peter’). Ten square miles of machair stretch from the western dunes to the eastern rocky moors. This is a plain of shell-sand, where millions of cockles and whelks, razor-shells and buckies, ground into ivory fragments smaller than a baby’s fingernail, have ...”

“... between interested parties on land claims. (The Aboriginal lawyer Noel Pearson once asked how many white people really wanted equality with black ones, given the life-expectancy statistics; on another occasion he shocked a TV interviewer by starting a sentence: ‘Now that I have entered the later part of my life ...’ He was 31 at the time.) The Native Tide ...”

“... that I could need £100. I’d go down there and he still wouldn’t pay me, and yet he’d have a white Rolls Royce with a chauffeur sitting outside waiting to take him wherever he wanted to go. But who says he paid the chauffeur? Not settling debts is hardly unheard of in Old Etonians. But Robert was a first-generation Etonian, and might conceivably have ...”

“... not least on the Barclays’ home turf of West London, where the slumlord turned property mogul Peter Rachman was making his fortune. The brothers set up an estate agency in Notting Hill. One day a woman came in looking to move to a particular street in the neighbourhood so that she could be near her elderly father. Frederick showed her a small house on the ...”

“... transformations’ of the 1960s at last reached Winesburg. On the 20th anniversary of the great White Panty Raid students occupied the offices of the dean of men and the dean of women, and shut down the college for a week. When classes resumed no one was punished, compulsory chapel was abolished, and all the rules and disciplines which for Marcus’s dean ...”

“... to policy circles, notably Eliot Cohen at Johns Hopkins; mid-grade military officers such as Peter Mansoor and Tom Greenwood, who were members of a ‘council of colonels’ convened to assess the war for the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS); a small group of retired generals and others led by Jack Keane, who, as army vice chief of staff, had enthusiastically ...”

“... been ugly, she noted, this performance may not have interested anyone; as a beautiful woman in a white jumpsuit, she was a sensation, and was even satirised in a Paul Newman movie. She made blasphemous altars covered in weapons, vermin, crucifixes (the MoMA show includes the large bronze Altar O.A.S., which attacks the Catholic Church for its role in French ...”

“... and shattering,’ says the blurb, ‘Savage Grace stands beside such classics as White Mischief and In Cold Blood.’ And what makes a classic in this genre? And why no mention of The Executioner’s Song and Mrs Trilling’s Mrs Harris? Never mind. The aim seems to be a succès de scandale purified by some sort of message. But hardly less ...”

“... is a transsexual, but the suggestion is that she wants to conform to society and can’t, just as Peter Pan, as Barrie finally admitted to himself, wanted to grow up, but couldn’t. Women are treated in The Well without much sympathy, and almost always as empty-headed. The whole book supports the view that men are naturally superior, which is why Stephen ...”

“... representative order, Rancière writes in The Future of the Image, ‘does not consist in painting white or black squares rather than the warriors of antiquity’. Nor is the aesthetic regime strictly a matter of ‘the conquest of autonomy by each art’, he tells us in the first pages of Aisthesis. In fact, Rancière attests, 15 years of work have brought ...”

“... On 18 October​ 2010 my father, Peter Campbell, was diagnosed with the cancer of which he would die exactly one year and one week later. I do not know precisely how he lived with the knowledge of his approaching death, what denials he practised or accommodations he reached, because he chose – once the oncologist at the Royal Marsden had handed down the death sentence – to live as much as possible as he had before ...”