“... in the character of the pig-woman Ursula – in the words of Peter Stallybrass and Allon White in The Politics and Poetics of Transgression (1986), ‘belly, womb, gaping mouth, udder . . . the celebrant of the open orifice’. It is a commonplace among critics that, since ‘Bartholomew Fair’ is almost the same thing or place as the theatre ...”

“... the ratification of the Kyoto Protocol, made the ecoterrorist a pop cultural staple. The nadir was Michael Crichton’s novel State of Fear (2004), in which a group of eco-extremists fake climate disasters for political ends. Crichton appended various denialist tracts to the text, though its paranoid reading of climate politics was a few years ahead of the ...”

“... would later become a black ghetto, Podhoretz was the star pupil in the local high school, where white students felt threatened by gangs of teenaged blacks. In his 1963 essay ‘My Negro Problem – and Ours’, this early experience of feeling, as a white boy, that it is he, not the black kids, who belongs to the ...”

“... the Presidential jet together with her personal maid. To the 220 sets of china she ordered for the White House at $1000 a set, just when Reagan was cutting welfare. To the $46,000 wardrobe she wore for the Inauguration in 1980, accepted as a gift from couturiers who wanted the cachet of dressing her. Here is a guide to arriviste style and greed: and we are ...”

“... much more unstable and challenging model – Shakespeare. The process is fairly familiar, but R.S. White, the author of two excellent books on Shakespearean romance and tragedy, has examined it in detail and come up with a host of fresh examples and insights. His book makes a good complement to John Barnard’s more general but also innovative study in the new ...”

“... that had successfully salvaged a wilderness from corporate and governmental assaults. Through Michael van Walt van der Praag, a Dutch lawyer long active in the Tibetan cause, he made contact with the Unrepresented Nations and Peoples Organisation. This gave him access to the United Nations Working Group on Indigenous Populations, which he addressed in ...”

“... stealing and that’s all they know.’ He also said that ‘he did not know of any instance of a white person cheating a black person in Tulia.’ Yet the races had always coexisted more or less peacefully in Tulia, despite the town’s near unanimous disdain for civil rights law in the 1950s and 1960s. Blacks – Donnie Smith and Freddie Brookins among them ...”

“... son Robert. From the hustings Robert noticed a ‘prodigiously large woman, dressed entirely in white, with a white parasol’, who was engaging members of the crowd in animated conversation. ‘Then,’ as Jane Carlyle recalled, ‘at the last the idea struck him “like a pistol shot” “it is my Mother!”’ Rosina ...”

“... Jerusalem. What happens to these fellers in the den or jungle of oblivion where the black becomes white, the white becomes the red is nobody’s business.The story itself is rather aimless and mostly intended to demonstrate the author’s hipness. Mabel the Sweet Honey that Poured Away, by contrast, is the sad tale of a ...”

“... and moths, from the scientific papers through one-liners down to single phrases (‘like a cabbage-white butterfly flying over the trenches’) to possible allusions, some of which, infuriatingly, escaped me? Boyd offers justifications. For example: ‘The entire selection of Nabokov’s work, published and unpublished, scientific and literary, polished and ...”

“... for which Epstein takes – and is usually given – personal credit). The fall came with the white flight from the metropolis to the suburbs, leaving independent booksellers in the cities without walk-in custom. Enter, in 1969, the book chains, serving a ‘malled’ and wheeled America and offering uniform, centrally managed retail outlets whose ...”

“... up years ago – and because of it too: the pace of change has picked up since then. The mayor, Michael Bloomberg, sometimes talks about the importance of tourism to New York as if tourists were more important to the city than its inhabitants, but when you consider that 44 million tourists visited the city last year – an increase of 25 per cent since 2001 ...”

“... from campaigning or taking office even if convicted. Under the constitution a candidate for the White House needs only to be 35 years of age, a ‘natural born’ citizen and a resident of the country for fourteen years. Those who drafted the constitution were too preoccupied with managing disagreements over slavery and representation to concern themselves ...”

“... to make a note as I got into a hotel lift and observed that it was full of Samoyeds, radiantly white dog-shaped clouds travelling up to the fourth floor in silence, black noses twitching in the dead air.If you watch Crufts on TV, as 8.5 million people do every year, you will see some pretty unusual things. Turn on Channel 4 during the International ...”

“... bones might be deep in Forest Lawn, but the audience expects and will pay for his presence. Michael Jackson Live? It’s a no-brainer, securing the singer a kind of higher existence – a freedom from quibbling reality – that the real Jackson tried to have all his life but could only dream of in a terrifying series of Neverlands.Dead 2Pac appeared at ...”