“... that Sandd put through his door after he resigned, advertising his job: a picture of four smiling white people in Sandd blue, striding down the road with light sheaves of paper, grinning. ‘Keep busy outdoors, in charge of your own time,’ it read. ‘Ideal for students, housewives and pensioners.’ He showed me a day’s work from just after ...”

“... Six weeks​ after President George W. Bush launched what the White House called a Global War on Terror, in October 2001, the journalist Bob Woodward asked the vice president, Dick Cheney, when the war would end. ‘Not in our lifetime,’ Cheney said. One can picture his barely suppressed smirk, a facial tic familiar from interviews ...”

“... housewives – anybody with whom they thought they could come to an arrangement. Many married white girls, even though they might already have young brides back home in Mirpur. They drank, ate meat that wasn’t halal, and only rarely went to the East London Mosque on Commercial Road, which had been established in 1941. They were living in that tough but ...”

“... after the August putsch, during which he had played a vigorous role in the defence of the White House through some tense and difficult days. He soon dominated the proceedings by the quickness of his wit and his ability to read and to lead the Deputies’ mood. Others were more popular (criticism of him from within has recently grown) but they were ...”

“... trophies to the wall. The wood-block floor has been covered with some ‘period-feel’ black and white squared linoleum. The museological debates that such a contrast raises hardly need rehearsing. On the one hand, we readily deplore the stuffy reticence, the wilfully uninformative style of version one – even if, at the same time, we are half-grateful that ...”

“... to the present). The term ‘dinosaur’ (meaning ‘terrible lizard’), coined in the 1840s by Richard Owen, is misleading: in fact dinosaurs are neither reptiles nor lizards (nor, inevitably, terrible). Charles Knight, who painted them for the American Museum of Natural History in New York and the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago from the turn ...”

“... initialled Amergin. This ur-bard’s ‘Alphabet Calendar’ receives an ingenious reading in The White Goddess, Muldoon reminds us, where its Protean swagger (‘I am a stag: of seven tines/I am a flood: across a plain’) is shown to conceal an alphabet of druidic tree-lore. Amergin probably wouldn’t have recognised the Roman alphabet; Ogham would have ...”

“... He did not give a damn about anything except zapping Communists. Nor did his chief supporter, Richard Perle, nicknamed ‘Prince of Darkness’, for his single-minded obsession with avenging his ancestors for what the Russian Reds did to them. Perle’s high moral tone reached its zenith when he recommended arms purchases from an Israeli firm which had ...”

“... of the aged Walt Whitman to ‘a great old Angora Tom’. The marvellous old poet, with his soft white hair and snowy silken ruff of beard, would have been delighted by the compliment. Philip Callow’s book is the most imaginative re-creation yet made of the poet’s daily physical being, and the photographs of the poet at all ages, from early manhood and ...”

“... has preferred the inferior and much less attractive portrait preserved at Lambeth House, where his white beard is so emphasised that Cranmer looks more like an Orthodox rabbi than an Archbishop of Canterbury. The beard also figures prominently in the book’s final illustrations, engravings which portray the last hours of his life, his burning at the stake ...”

“... in 1678 and became the first Englishman to make the journey to Mecca and return, long before Richard Burton’s celebrated voyage in 1853. Pitts converted to Islam, as so many in his situation did, and although he remained a slave until 1693, when he managed to escape, he seems to have been treated well and to have formed a largely favourable view of his ...”

“... babbled upstairs. Sometimes she would allow guests a viewing of her brother, dressed by her in a white pleated robe like a Brahmin. Meta von Salis, who provided a free house in Weimar, the Villa Silberblick, for the Nietzsches and the archive (and to whom Elisabeth presented a bill for redecoration), was appalled when she read a newspaper article by a ...”

“... untamed capitalist development, indifference to the environment and disregard for disposable, non-white people has already produced lethal crises – famines, fires and floods – that we mistakenly chalk up to ‘natural causes’ or ‘acts of God’. Dead Cities, a collection of articles written between 1990 and 2002, does not limit its concerns to the ...”

“... yet somehow distinctive, relatively easy to identify (Norman Foster, along with his former partner Richard Rogers, is English for Architecture). No wonder corporate and political leaders hire this stylish practice: there is a mirroring of self-images here, at once technocratic and innovative, that suits client and firm alike. ‘Foster’ offers an ...”

“... doggedly. She didn’t want to be dependent on an animal to get around. And she didn’t want a white stick, either. She just wanted to sit still. But they were not going to discharge her from hospital until she agreed to go for walks outdoors with a cane, and consented to have a dog. Only an admission of helplessness and acceptance of a full-time ...”