“... was one of shiny appliances, finned automobiles with hood ornaments fit for Vikings, black and white television sets piping perky laugh-track entertainment into the living room as the kids did their homework lying on the rug, backyard barbecues, pool parties, and drunken passes and spats at cocktail parties that entered local lore. Updike’s early stories ...”

“... Lord 1327, upon the sixth day of April, at the first hour, in the church of Santa Clara [Sainte-Claire] at Avignon; and in the same city, in the same month of April, on the same sixth day, at the same first hour, in the year 1348, that light was taken from our day, while I was by chance in Verona, ignorant, alas, of my fate. The sad tidings reached me at ...”

“... in an early colour film: ‘A blinding red carpet covers the whole area of the screen./A row of white chairs with red upholstery cuts across at a slant./Red exists!’ ‘I want to describe how it feels to step for the first time on the soil of the film kingdom, Hollywood,’ Eisenstein tells us at the start of his memoir – but never quite does. This is a ...”

“... him get behind phallocentricism to a theoretical realm in which language and desire compose the white noise of libidinised thought. In consequence, his criticism has more purchase than that familiar Freudian writing which, revisionary in a naive sense, reinscribes the theory. When Terry Eagleton, for instance, in his erratic and self-regarding William ...”

“... in the Thirties, he made Hollywood, its gods and goddesses, its imaginary America of swing, white telephones and good-sport girls, his myth of the desirable centre. His first published writing, he admitted; was a letter sent to a film magazine when he was ten, asking the Warner Brothers for more of Humphrey Bogart, just seen in The Petrified Forest. His ...”

“... He is contemptuous of ‘the conspiracy theory of world terrorism’, and hints that the book by Claire Sterling, a contributor to Netanyahu, which pins the responsibility for international terrorism on the KGB, was largely the product of the CIA’s disinformation department. No doubt terrorists pool information, and the USSR no doubt trains some ...”

“... of wall, where a mysterious heap of personal trash may be piled up. Every morning, early, a small white cleaning truck comes along with its revolving brushes, pausing by a diminutive metal trash bag holder for the crew to remove and replace the suspended trash bag. Supplementing this vehicle are individual men in yellow vests with brooms, working by ...”

“... from cheerfulness to death, without it seeming so dark or sordid a journey. The hotels were white. ‘They come here to die,’ wrote the man who laid out the gardens by the pier at Bournemouth. ‘Let us make death beautiful.’ The Royal National Sanitarium opened in 1855, followed by specialised ‘homes’ for invalid ladies, or for consumptives who ...”

“... know Mr Smith, too, very well; – I always have him before me at the Hampstead Ball, Dressed in a White Coat, & a Tambour waistcoat, worked in Silk.’ By some of her critics, like Mrs Montagu, Burney was herself accused of vulgarity for writing the novel. Certainly, the volume of her Early Journals and Letters for 1778 records the author’s own mixed ...”

“... rushed to Rome. Mazzini arrived, from his exile in London, and so did Garibaldi, ‘atop a white horse wearing a red jacket with a short tail and a small black felt hat, his chestnut hair falling in tousled tresses to his broad shoulders’. Insurgent Rome expected support from Paris, failing to grasp how far power in France had shifted to the ...”

“... spindly echelon. It was during a visit to the Essex marshland that she became, as her biographer Claire Harman puts it, ‘properly her own person’. For the first time in her life, she was later to recall, she felt ‘socketed into the universe and passionately quiescent’. As far as I’m aware, nobody ever had the temerity to describe Warner as ...”

“... struggle against the British leads him to balance with care but not to obscure Mitchel’s role in white supremacy: his ‘passionately rational hatred of capitalism … led him to a violent irrationality about race that still thrives globally amid latter-day slaveries’.The editors of the Routledge Handbook note that the success and failure of the Celtic ...”

“... for Net Zero, and the reported five-hundred-plus fossil-fuel lobbyists in attendance, as well as Claire O’Neill, his predecessor as the COP president, who after Boris Johnson had her sacked got a job representing BP, Shell and Philip Morris, among others, with the World Business Council for Sustainable Development. Sharma had been subsisting on Jelly ...”

“... in the back garden of a council house a small pavilion has been set up and two figures in the white suits of forensic experts are lumbering in and out of the house. It’s a crime scene, though Jamie, the cheeky grips, suggests it could be quite a small wedding. When we reach the school they tell us it’s a 30-year-old man, an old boy of the school, who ...”

“... of Power in Javanese Culture’, published in 1972 in Culture and Politics in Indonesia, edited by Claire Holt. The essay had an unlikely origin. One day, as I was sitting in my office with the door open, two senior professors walked by, chatting loudly on their way to lunch. The man doing most of the talking was Allan Bloom, who much later published a ...”