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“... and poisoning. He is at his best when he lets himself be carried away. Diving into the sea is a ‘white-noise smash, followed by a sudden, astonishing emergence in a silent blue world’. Contemplating the rock through which Victorian engineers ‘punched their way’, he writes: ‘Free as I was to stand and stare, the exposed stone seemed to catch me up out ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... was the final episode of the fifth season of Dynasty, when Amanda Carrington’s wedding to Prince Michael of Moldavia is interrupted by a gang of Balkan rebels bursting into the royal chapel and shooting everyone down with machine-guns. The vaporous metaphorical role played by music in Bel Canto is taken in Patchett’s new novel, State of Wonder, by medical ...”

“... and was sitting at the top of the New York Times bestseller list, a place usually reserved for Michael Crichton or Tom Clancy. The book’s success is a categorial surprise, since literary novels hardly ever reach a mass audience in America; but its subject-matter is so perfectly resonant with the tenor of the times that its appeal is transparent. The book ...”

“... from the New World, including a 16th-century watercolour of the Mines of Potosí and a blue and white jar produced in mid-17th-century Mexico, were acquired by Huntington himself, but most of those in the collection have been added in recent years. These will be critical to the museum’s success with the largely Hispanic local community when the ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... of the state. In Saydnaya there were regular mass hangings in the basement of the prison’s ‘white building’. Political power, which had once been expressed through the Baath Party, was increasingly concentrated in Assad’s immediate circle and formerly powerful autonomous institutions lost all influence. Part of the reason for Assad’s rapid ...”

“... up from tearing strips off the now dead bird. Eventually R. opens the back door and the hawk, a white flash on its breast, flies off with (R. thinks) a blackbird in pursuit. All that it leaves on the grass is a smear and some feathers, everything else – beak, claws, legs – has been eaten. It’s something neither of us has ever seen before and leaves us ...”

“... a remarkably handsome newspaper, much more spacious in its page layouts and crisper in its black/white contrasts than its rival, the Sunday Times, which looked untidy and grey by comparison. Throughout the 1950s it was the dominant ‘quality’ Sunday paper, certainly in its cultural and political influence among the young if not always in terms of its ...”

“... of news pages and bad for advertisers, yet he would work only for the Magazine and its Art Editor, Michael Rand. Wyndham believed, on the contrary, that people liked reading about diverting, strange, glamorous subjects – and that glamour should not be taken seriously. He was also writing pieces in his own highly original style – pieces that were often ...”

“... In the Californian Sierra, ‘the presence of an atmosphere is hardly recognised, and the thin, white, bodiless light of the morning comes to the peaks and glaciers as a pure spiritual essence, the most impressive of all the terrestrial manifestations of God.’ Canoeing along the ice-cliffs of coastal Alaska he feels the same: ‘bays full of hazy ...”

“... of the kings of France, trade routes to Islam, routes of Viking invasions – thus, so, black and white, and not otherwise. What lies behind it all? History of this kind maximises one’s information, minimises doubt. Its authors are pressed into shorthand statements, which often invite one tacitly to assume that things have not changed very much since the ...”

“... its wet, warm arms, showering her with thousands of greedy, rough kisses, blinding her with the white zigzag explosions of uncountable lightning bolts, deafening her with ear-splitting rolls of thunder ... Then already hopelessly soaked, she stood up straight, offering her body to the powerful surge of water. For an instant the thought crossed her mind to ...”

“... were bared almost to the hips where the while fringes of her drawers were like feathering of soft white down ... Her bosom was as a bird’s, soft and slight, slight and soft as the breast of some dark-plumaged dove. But her long fair hair was girlish: and girlish, and touched with the wonder of mortal beauty, her face.   She was alone and still, gazing ...”