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“... two thousand metres above sea level. In spring, the distinctive green columns produce a large white and yellow blossom, which blooms at night and is pollinated by hummingbirds and bats. Like many plants, the San Pedro cactus converts amino acids into compounds known as alkaloids. The evolutionary purpose of San Pedro’s most famous alkaloid, the ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... immaculate man who always seemed to be wearing the same plain clothes, year in and year out – a white cotton shirt, a dark tie, a tan poplin suit, a coconut-straw hat with a maroon and navy striped band. He was an avid reader of newspapers – his knowledge was said to be encyclopedic – and he always carried one around with him. One time I noticed it was ...”

“... Reagan, of Hollywood, Disneyland and John Wayne. Nixon would have lost his home state and the White House in 1968 without his Southern California support. At the 1984 Republican Convention, Reagan, our second Southern California President, was the subject of a celebratory film: it was introduced, as Richard Slotkin points out in Gunfighter Nation ...”

“... The Life and Letters volume reprints the first biography, by his masterly literary executor William Frederic Badé. The narrative is laced with Muir’s letters, which rival Lawrence’s in the wholeheartedness of their responses to life around him and to his correspondents. In them we see a man at one with himself and with the granite, the fast ...”

“... fears for his family and disillusionment with the practical realities of becoming a Muslim William Wallace in somebody else’s war stifled his yearning to be a righteous soldier. During the Bosnian conflict he visited the barracks of the Kateebah mujahedin, the Bosnian foreign legion, but stayed only three weeks and did not fight, although he ...”

“... and violence, of prostitutes and pimps, of tenements and penitentiaries – the world of the ‘white slave trade’ – but it is to here that the trail keeps winding back, to London’s East End in 1888, to the scene in that bedroom in Miller’s Court, and to the unanswered question which is at least part of the Ripper’s enduring fascination: who was ...”

“... the South Atlantic, the Indian Ocean and the China Sea. These ships were very pretty things, with white painted upperworks, black hulls with red waterlines, yellow funnels and masts. (A version of this livery survives in the last royal yacht, Britannia, now moored as a museum piece in Edinburgh, and also on matchboxes.) The decks of this late Victorian Navy ...”

“... place in a liminal space set apart from life as it is customarily lived (by Hollywood’s mostly white audience), is to reassert a common human bond by dissolving social, cultural and racial identity.The result, as Klawans rightly remarks, is ‘a scene of Black church life so dignified and respectful’ as to be ‘almost unassimilable’ within classical ...”

“... Nadu. The cathedral of San Thome, rebuilt in 1893, is a large neo-Gothic structure in wedding-cake white not far from the southern end of Chennai’s Marine Beach. I saw his tomb in the crypt beneath it, and the displayed sliver of his bone, and the shard of the spear that killed him. The tomb does not actually contain Thomas’s remains, which have a ...”

“... we realise. We too have bodies which would, unpacked, reveal, like those of any animal, blue-white connective tissue, creamy fat, clots of crimson blood and veins of blue and lilac. In Chardin’s kitchen scene the ribs and halved vertebrae of a piece of loin are painted with even, clotted touches of pigment: dignified by the gravity of the painter’s ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... began defining ‘The Playboy Philosophy’ – a kind of ‘hedonistic utilitarianism’, as William F. Buckley put it. The magazine was originally designed, Hefner admitted, as a ‘romantic reflection of earlier times’. His achievement was to associate sex with upward mobility by making his readers feel they were part of an elite gentlemen’s ...”

“... against the Picturesque was one motivating factor for the Modernist garden movement. Black and white photographs enhanced the linearity of the designs and the autochrome – a technique as short-lived as the gardens them selves – threw unifying veils of pointillist colour over decorative schemes. This process set the garden and its image into an exactly ...”

“... assumptions about the role of rape in our culture. Both present America in a state of crisis. William Kennedy Smith, Mike Tyson and Clarence Thomas are just the tip of the iceberg; the statistics are horrific. Rape is increasing four times faster than any other crime. Anywhere from 20 to 44 per cent of girls in their early teens can expect to suffer rape ...”