“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... combined with sharp practice. The Treaty of Waitangi (1840) between the indigenous Maori and the white settlers of New Zealand existed in two versions, English and Maori. But, as Kumarasingham notes, they don’t quite say the same thing. The Maori version suggests that local chieftains were not surrendering their sovereignty or possessions to the British ...”

“... display of anamorphosis. What appears, when viewed head on, to be a large, greyish-white streak between the men’s feet resolves, when viewed from the side, into a skull which seems to project from the wooden panel. Although most of Holbein’s surviving paintings are not signed, this one is. On the floor behind and to the left of ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... but able to accommodate Robert (son of Edwin) Lutyens’s stores for Marks and Spencer as well as Richard Neutra’s blonde American beach houses. Hilaire Belloc, Evelyn Waugh, Cyril Connolly, Freya Stark, even Penelope Chetwode (Mrs Betjeman) shared the pages with respected authorities on building materials, the English town (‘one must not be too gay or ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... was spoken with impassive distance – perhaps even irony – by a heavily-armed commando in the White House, as we looked down at the first, still rather scattered and tentative outbursts of revelry among the crowds camped in the night below round the Russian Parliament. There was still no hard news of what had happened in the Crimea, but by the evening of ...”

“... It’s not difficult to guess where they’re making for: their new gallery, Jay Jopling’s White Cube2 in Hoxton Square. You don’t really need to go inside the sugar-frosted box to see what’s happening. You can get it from the street. This is top dollar, scratchcard art. Either it works in one hit or forget it. If it doesn’t jab you in the eye as ...”

“... or almost here, and then it’s gone: politics as a dance of blind men thrashing the air with white sticks, while failing to land a single blow on a Struwwelpeter clown-king bent on slow-puncture abdication by photo opportunity, a different costume or a different country every night. This man changes the rules of the game if he is in danger of losing a ...”