“... story – the vague artistic ambitions, the disappearing cities. She gives a brief black-and-white memory of Rochester, New York, where she was born, its factories and aqueducts and cold winters, a city she’s forgotten ‘like any birth canal’. And then the California of her childhood and adolescence, where her ancestors had owned a ranch in what is ...”

“... a column of guards marching off to Finchley in three orderly ranks, their bayonets, red coats and white spatterdashes all gleaming in the April sunshine. Depending on which source you believe, George II was either fascinated or appalled by the painting. ‘Pray,’ he is said to have asked a nobleman in waiting – and if he did, he revealed himself as still ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Quarter. Lindsay is told that ‘nobody walks in Dubai,’ but this should be modified: nobody white walks in Dubai. Everywhere I went – along the baking sidewalks of Sheikh Zayed Road, through the dust clouds boiling into the phantasm of Tiger Woods Design’s golf development – I encountered brown and black men, on foot, parted from their families ...”

“... children’). Evelyn tells us this, and in The Natural History of Selborne Gilbert White repeats it, describing the procedure in detail: if the gash in the tree healed, so would the infant. White also talks about a ‘shrew ash’ in the parish, which was used to cure lameness in livestock. If a horse was ...”

“... are still major obstacles for those who do not form part of the Bar’s core constituency of white middle-class males. Dominic makes great play of a technique of his father’s which is common to all criminal barristers, who vary their accent depending on who they are speaking to – from mockney when talking to clients in the cell to Little Lord ...”

“... a game played by correspondence between the Paris and London chess clubs in 1834. In response to white’s first move of a pawn to e4, black nudges his pawn on the same file, just one square to e6. It’s a treacherous attack from the outset, a boxer emerging from his corner arms swinging. But just as a boxer must compromise his guard in order to throw his ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... called The Mirror in Europe, Particularly in France. There are passing references to Shakespeare (Richard II’s famous mirror soliloquy) and there’s an excellent extended analysis of a passage in Rilke, as well as scattered references to other European writers; and many of the paintings are German or Dutch. But most of the literary sources are French, and ...”