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“... what order. Stanzas follow the movement of eye and mind from road to roadside, through ‘leafless white birches’ to a munitions plant, or to the ‘beauty,/at the swamp’s centre: the/dead-end highway, abandoned/ when the new bridge went in’. Williams’s most powerful lines show, in ‘Spring Strains’ for example, how an observer might scan a young ...”

“... crammed into this unlovely paragraph, taken from the introductory chapter to the Government’s White Paper, The Future of Higher Education, published earlier this year. It is also the thought of that room in Whitehall where these collages are assembled. As the findings from the latest survey of focus groups come in, an official cuts out all those things ...”

“... him about it. He worked in Rhodesia in the 1970s as a young soil scientist preventing earth on white-owned farms being washed away by the rain. He became fond of the country, then run by Ian Smith’s white minority government in defiance of the rest of the world, including its former colonial master, Britain, and ...”

“... I am not entirely content with the degree of whiteness in my life. My bedroom is white; white walls, icy mirrors, white sheets and pillowcases, white slatted blinds. It’s the best I could do. Some lack of courage – I wouldn’t want to be thought extreme – has prevented me from having a white bedstead and side tables ...”

“... the 11th, 12th and 13th centuries – the Europe of Anselm, Adelard of Bath, Bernard of Clairvaux, Peter Abelard, Hugh of St Victor, Suger, Otto of Freising, John of Salisbury, Chrétien de Troyes, Marie de France, Hildegard of Bingen, Gottfried von Strassburg, Wolfram von Eschenbach, Roger Bacon, Snorri Sturluson, Leonardo Fibonacci, Aquinas and many others ...”

“... Even the Shah smelled a rat and turned it down. (I wonder what title Weidenfeld had in mind – White Star over Iran? Star in the East?) Having already been lumbered with the Shah’s massively counter-productive work, Towards the Great Civilisation, Radji could spot the Chalfont-Kim Il Sung shoot-self-in-foot syndrome and hastened to Ashraf’s side. He ...”

“... these days. A candidate who lacks basic qualifications (and hence could not present himself in a white toga) is a ‘nigrate’. The Maltese censors who finally allow Toomey his copy of Thomas Campion’s poems confuse the poet with the English martyr Edmund Campion. (Some autobiography there, I believe.) ‘Richardtionary’ is the polite homosexual term ...”

“... is sufficiently good-humoured and various to accommodate a pleasingly disgusting horror story, ‘White Lies’, and a disarming comedy, ‘Algebra’, about a gentle homosexual who, to his own surprise, takes literary London by storm simply through flattering famous writers and inviting them round for little social evenings. If Theroux has a weakness, it is ...”

“... though not always as successful. I find it hard to enjoy the florid extravagances of Patrick White’s Voss, while respecting the attempt to make word match fact. Xavier Herbert tried to meet size with size, insisting that his Poor Fellow My Country, close on a million words, be published in a single hardback volume which one day may kill a frail reader ...”

“... of around twenty thousand laboured on the island’s plantations; there were between 1500 and 2000 white residents, including plantation owners, government officials, priests, doctors, craftsmen and police. At the time of Hans Jonathan’s birth, his mother, Emilia Regina, was a slave in the household of Henrietta Cathrina and her husband, Ludvig Heinrich ...”

“... of Hertford in rooms upholstered and draped and carpeted in ‘flesh pink’, crimson, scarlet and white, with contrasting black-patinated bronzes. By chance an inventory of the contents of Lord Hertford’s villa in Regent’s Park survives which closely corresponds, although without the alarming carnal epithet. Other sources confirm his account of the ...”

“... of coverage.’ In Regent’s Park rows of old ladies were sitting in the rose garden. In their white skirts and sandals, they had an air of seen-it-all about them, pointing to beds of flowers and thinking nothing of cellophane. And maybe they had seen it all: by the boating pond, fixed to the bandstand, was a plaque engraved with yet more London ...”

“... Cakes of Gooseberry Lady Barrington’s Way’, or ‘Lady Arundel’s Manchet’ (manchet is white bread made from fine flour). But there is a complicated relationship with social hierarchy here: alongside these over-the-shoulder forms of aristocratic verification jostles a commitment to distribution – a paradox caught neatly in Partridge’s recipe ...”

“... over time, it’s important that they don’t change too much while they’re in there. A large white loaf (unsliced) needs to weigh between 750 and 800 grams to be judged comparable to others that have gone before. Jars of peanut butter must be 225-300g (but the container doesn’t have to be a jar). Not any cut flowers, but carnations on the stem. Bras ...”

“... out the tests on Josephine he and I chatted about the great days of Charlie Cooke, David Webb and Peter Osgood. He told me it was already too late to try AZT and 3TC on Josephine but he was cautiously hopeful. ‘To get Aids there has to be mixing of blood, which means there has to be a break in the skin or an open sore due to some other sexually transmitted ...”