“... Inca aristocracy. Defeated, leaderless, politically fragmented and cowed by the savagery of the white invaders, the Quechua Indians were almost at once reduced to slavery while the colonists helped themselves to the region’s fabulous riches. There were slave rebellions, hopeless, brutal, millenarian. In the rebellion of 1780-81 Tupac Amaru, a mestizo ...”

“... The linen mills, the long wet grass, the ragged hawthorn. And one read black where the other read white, his hope The other man’s damnation: Up the Rebels, To Hell with the Pope, And God Save – as you prefer – the King or Ireland However, one of the most important reclamations of recent years is the group of translations, by Thomas Kinsella, of poems ...”

“... paint Which flies in dollops like wet chamois leathers Whilst air-burst cardboard shells disgorge white feathers. My own view is we ought to go ahead Even though press support brings only shame. But my view’s that of one with a warm bed While others face the shrapnel and the flame. What can you do except note with due dread The other side in this case are ...”

“... to the Open University). In turn, industrial change meant fewer unskilled manual jobs and more white coats and white collars. Mrs Thatcher had clearly sought to capture this new meritocracy. But – so the Gang of Four argued – many of these classless voters wanted to break free from the old class-based parties. They ...”

“... was still primarily a matter of appearance, of clean clothes rather than of clean bodies. Spotless white lace collars symbolised social superiority, and though the beauty counsellors of the time had a great deal to say about cosmetics, hair care and dress, they said little about washing. Cleanliness, Ward thinks, was not a necessary requirement for female ...”

“... Feeling, the queer theorist Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick describes its strange and haunting black and white cover photograph as ‘the catalyst that impelled me to assemble the book in its present form’. It depicts a woman clumsily embracing an object that resembles an enormous wasps’ nest made of sticks and twine. The woman’s eyes are shut, and her face is ...”

“... previous eighteen months: colour had come back, after years of exclusion, into Kline’s black and white world. There are distinct echoes of the Klines – of his tribute to King Oliver’s syncopation, for example – in Suburb in Havana. De Kooning, to sum up, was a creature of the New York School. But he was also a naïf, a Great American Artist, a ...”

“... the sacking on the basis of the novel, but would not defend his civil marriage. McGahern wrote to Michael McLaverty: ‘The union is a paper tiger, the Church has all the power.’ One of the union officials asked him what had come over him to marry a foreigner when there were thousands of Irish women ‘with their tongues hanging out for a ...”

“... vision of the dedicated District Officer, attired in pith helmet and spine pad, bent low under the white man’s burden, followed by a line of unfortunate and heavily perspiring Africans, in their turn burdened more directly by bedding roll, portable canvas wash basin, ceramic water filter, cases of whisky, and brass-bound thunderbox. When the European ...”

“... and influential writers and preachers of his age to a dull and worthy figure. Both Greaves and Michael Davies appear to accept, and even collude with, Bunyan’s diminished presence in contemporary British culture. Bunyan, however, remains an enduring presence in Ulster Protestantism. In a lecture given many years ago, ‘The Triumph of the Word of God in ...”

“... with volumes devoted to the American ‘empire’. But how appropriate is this evocative term? Michael Mann has been working for two decades as ‘a historical sociologist on the nature of power in human societies’. In this dense and lively volume, composed ‘at breakneck speed’, he analyses and evaluates the main strands of US global influence, with ...”

“... major blight, a steady stream of ‘I-Spy’ water fowl. Fish corpses (nothing more exciting than white-bellied carp). I think we can assume that we have penetrated the Lea Valley’s recreational zone. Boats. Wet suits. Easy access to the North Circular Road, the broken link of an earlier orbital fantasy. This border is marked by a permanent pall of thick ...”

“... standard-issue purple balaclava and a banana taped to his hairy stomach. He stands in front of the white wall of an art gallery; a label to his left reads ‘The Impossible Dream of a Pubic Fruit’ and an audience looks up at his giant grey legs. The image is one of five thousand that make up the digital artist Beeple’s collage Everydays: The First 5000 ...”

“... its time (apart from a Native American cop/tracker and a Chinese femme fatale, the town was wholly white), and Laura’s and the killer’s multiple identities clearly had some imaginative traffic with the 1980s recovered-memory movement. Still, almost from the moment of its cancellation the show sidestepped datedness by becoming an object of nostalgia, thanks ...”

“... to writers such as Rebecca West, Rosamond Lehmann, Elizabeth Taylor, Barbara Comyns and Antonia White. White’s Frost in May, another study of the horrors of convent life, was one of Virago’s first notable successes when it was reissued in 1978. Other writers she championed had truly been forgotten: on Desert Island ...”