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“... resurrection rituals danced by the doomed Plains Indians when they realised that progress and white chicanery had undone them for ever. All this personal information is compressed into a mere couple of emotionally controlled pages out of 400. The rest is eye, ear and different kinds of curiosity: historical, technical, geographical. The result falls short ...”

“... areas of flesh colour, buff and sandy brown are contrasted with neat patterns of black and white and golden-brown clothing, and with the red of wine or cherries and the fresh green of vine leaves – all contained originally (as early inventories invariably indicate) by black frames. But when commissioned to paint larger and more complex narratives he ...”

“... The American Cancer (a title of 1931) threatened the French way of life. The war had bled France white, economic crisis had destabilised it further. The French began to question themselves, their status as a power, their national security and national values. Stereotypes coined in the 19th century were dusted off and brought up to date. American ...”

“... material for biographers and Patton has had a dozen already, to say nothing of a film that brought Richard Nixon great consolation during the lonely watches of the Watergate nights. Only Erwin Rommel can match Patton in the publicity stakes, and he was a very much duller man. For the British, Patton may have been a minor if spectacular figure in World War ...”

“... place both in France and in Britain, but certainly not in the same manner. Social historians like Richard Cobb have done such amazing work on the French Revolution, studying the minutest lineaments of ‘the real thing’, that one begins to look for their sort of history in a historical novel and to feel thwarted when such topics are ruled out of court by ...”

“... sea passage ... never once entered my head. Of course, it is coming to me now.’ The luxurious white ghost ship Armorica sails into his mind’s eye, and we flash back to the world of then, where suddenly and bewilderingly the narrator, too, has taken on a period role, indeed vanished, while we’re caught up in the shipboard romance of two ...”

“... as a child, though I read about polar explorers and enjoyed the mise-en-scène of polar bears, white-outs, ice floes and the rest, the word ‘north’ exercised over me little of the magic it has for so many others, including Kavenna and Peter Davidson. ‘The Idea of North’ was the Canadian pianist Glenn Gould’s phrase and the title of a radio ...”

“... and accorded his copy of Alberto Sartoris’s important 1948 survey the rather surreal honour of a white fur binding. (Many years later he showed the well-used and grubby object to Sartoris, a distinguished Roman academic, who was predictably horrified by it.) Having been a bird-watching, un-academic schoolboy, Stirling now read voraciously and ...”

“... remains blank, with the super-title, ‘Permission to reproduce denied’. This happens in Richard Billingham’s case as well, although his pictures of his family escape Stallabrass’s everlasting fire. Concurrently with last year’s Turner Prize show at the Tate, Ana Maria Pacheco, a Brazilian artist long resident in this country, showed the works ...”

“... set in the Middle Ages; bicycled around France studying its medieval architecture; hero-worshipped Richard the Lionheart; rubbed medieval brasses; was fascinated by medieval heraldry, glass, coins and weapons; wrote his undergraduate thesis on crusader castles (his introduction to ‘Arabia’); and, before the war came along to interrupt his academic ...”

“... gasps of amazement wherever it rode: ‘100 very handsome proper young men, whom he clad in white doubletts and scarlett breeches, and scarlet coates, hatts, and … feathers, well-horsed, and armed’. A year later he was frantically trying to sell the equipment off to meet his gambling debts. In 1641 he and Davenant were involved in a reckless attempt ...”

“... story, ‘A Vignette’, is the first-person narrator repeatedly haunted by the horrifying white face that appears at the hole in the gate of the fir plantation. Indeed, I haven’t noticed the word ‘haunted’ used much anywhere else in the stories. James declared himself dissatisfied with ‘A Vignette’ as ‘short and ill written’. On the ...”

“... It is concerned with ‘knowingness’. Few works are more indisputably travel writing than Richard Burton’s Personal Narrative of a Pilgrimage to Al Madinah and Meccah (1855): every detail in his ‘pilgrimage’ – the attempt by an infidel Westerner to pass himself off as an Arab pilgrim and gain sight of the Muslim sacred places and ceremonies ...”

“... villain, who is systematically punished and degraded in the book’s concluding sections, is a white-handed aristocrat, distinguished by the brilliant diamonds that he wears at all times. Isabel’s history reinforces the point. The over-protected daughter of a lord, she is reduced to the status of a servant, and her downfall is attributed to the ...”

“... to Hastings. They were violent and sometimes cruel: when peasants in Normandy sent envoys to Duke Richard II to ask for the continuation of their customary rights to wood and water, his response was to send the envoys back without their hands and feet. The practice may have been inherited from Richard’s Viking ...”