“... weird childlike quality’ or freaked out by his in-the-moment oddness. Curtis also has an echo in Richard Curtis, the Memorial Device drummer, who leaves his wife (and the band) for a twenty-year-old Palestinian girl after she takes down her knickers to reveal a ‘bald fact’. He vows to follow her to ‘the end of the world’.Keenan’s male characters ...”

“... upset perceived dichotomies. He has compared Skippy Dies to the mix of ‘bubblegum pop’ and ‘white noise’ in the Sonic Youth song ‘JC’. For The Mark and the Void (2015), about the relationship between a banker called Claude and an amoral novelist called Paul Murray, he drew on Barthes’s analysis of mythologies and Nietzsche’s idea of ...”

“... nearest bushes, possessed by ‘a single unmixed instinct of fear for his young and happy life’. Richard Holmes’s impressive and absorbing Firing Line shows how accurately Tolstoy projected, in this episode and others, the psychology of troops in battle. Holmes quotes Lieutenant David Tinker on his first experience, during the Falklands War, of being ...”

“... San Francisco artist Jimmy Miles, incline to a dry, coolly minimalist practice, in which white space is not only tolerated, but an essential, if seriously off-kilter aesthetic feature in its own right: I’m not sure what to call Miles’s austere and evacuated style. Some kind of Blakean radical simplicity? A borderline personality’s childlike ...”

“... would direct Easter Parade and Summer Stock. In the scene, Garland’s character has been given a white piano for her birthday: she sits on it and is wheeled round the room by a crowd of young men in dinner jackets who are supposedly students at an all-male college. Walters himself dances with Garland as she spins round the room with a Ginger Rogers-ish ...”

“... tournaments for a while after the sight of the Minister of Health playing an all-night session at White’s caused a degree of scandal. The Treasury had been hoping to cut NHS funding but Macleod routed the attempt by setting up a committee to examine NHS expenditure: the crucial brief was written by two young welfare radicals, ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... in the countryside and small towns, among butchers, bakers and candlestick-makers, farmers, white-collar workers and local government clerks. The reasons for this have also become familiar. Craftsmen and shopkeepers were squeezed between large capital and organised labour, resentful of both and attracted by the smallman anti-capitalism of the ...”

“... and confinement by teaching himself chess from a book of famous games, playing both Black and White; he exhausts the games in the book and plays himself in his head, his Black self improving to solve the ever harder problems his White self sets; eventually, divided, he goes mad. Reassuringly, this isn’t how chess is ...”

“... almost perfect lack of surface structure ensures that it strikes nothing that might end up in the white circulation of thought.’ On a long, fast ride, the run-of-the-mill cycling brain can turn the tiniest flaw into a grinding, unignorable obsession: ‘a pounding riff from a song, a bit of long division that starts over and over, a magnified anger at ...”

“... odd little book is eventually going to turn into a mock-judicial arraignment of the great lover. Richard Aldington (The Romance of Casanova) likewise adopts a God’s eye-view, makes Balbi a lay figure called Marco and invents a barmy alternative outcome whereby Casanova is recaptured and brainwashed. Sabatini, who as a gifted linguist could have worked ...”

“... bleating like eminent Victorians.’ ‘A man came down the street with the meth-pink eyes / of a white rat, his gait a mortal shuffle.’ Hofmann also has an ear for ironies that leave some sort of opening for kindness, and he has a tenderness for all defiances or survivals of neglect: The branch-line is under the axe, but it still runs, rattling and ...”

“... first of four volumes. He has used a far wider range of sources than was available to Professor Richard Ullman when he began his masterly three-volume account of the same events. The title of this first book is somewhat misleading, for the focus is British: no attempt has been made to use the French archives, which still await exploration. Moreover, and ...”

“... they were in France, they had to call in a nurse from the American Hospital in Paris. She was a White Russian, Mongolian or ‘Chinky-looking’, and, Una thought, ‘quite unmistakably of our own class’. John, at 54, fell insanely in love with Evguenia Souline. She was restrained, but only for a short time, by the thought of the example of infidelity ...”

“... already had a couple of unsettling epiphanies this soccer year. Out of habit, I battled my way to White Hart Lane on the first day of the season, expecting to savour the ten-year-old’s sensations I’ve been savouring for thirty years: the verdant sward, the August sun, the eager, shirt-sleeved throng and, best of all, the certain knowledge that my ...”