“... reveries. In some ways, the middle-period novels that made him famous do the same, only better: White Noise (1985) is a non-stop sequence of witty routines with a more ingenuous straight man than usual and an uncharacteristically warm current of ‘eerie feeling’ for suburban family life. But slipping a few sugar cubes into his medicine bag isn’t the ...”

“... feel about the placing of such an establishment in this location, has a magical quality … The white dome, which is the outer shell of the containment building that protects the reactor and its steam generator, is about 230 ft (70 metres) high and can be glimpsed from miles around. Pevsner, admirer of Gropius and risk-taker that he was, had no obvious ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... A recent biopic, Andrei Kravchuk’s Admiral, celebrates the life of Aleksandr Kolchak, the White commander who governed Siberia between 1918 and 1920. But it’s worth remembering the totalitarian potential, as well as the outright brutality, of the White counter-revolutionary forces during this period. Had the ...”

“... we imagine between her face and her mask.’ The images of Doris Day (that blonde hair, those white teeth) and her personas as the spunky girl next door, the tightly wound career woman and the gung-ho housewife have been fixed for years now, but the person who played Doris Day is less clear. It’s difficult even to know what to call her. The band leader ...”

“... in terms of life-likeness, on what Titian achieved in the first decades of the 16th century. William Rossetti compared Titian to Shakespeare – both were universal geniuses, both loyal to their home towns. A deeper resemblance is the impossibility in either case of identifying a coherent character, a voice in the work. Titian makes you think about what ...”

“... With its ten million members, it’s bigger than the Freemasons, the Rotarians, the TUC, the White Aryan Resistance, the Samaritans, the KKK, the Women’s Institute and – in terms of weekly attendance – the Church of England. But if AA is big, so is alcoholism. If you accept the modest estimate that 10 per cent of the adult population of this ...”

“... into the war. No evidence is cited for this statement, possibly made when Struther stayed at the White House in June 1943, and it bears the hallmark of FDR’s usual hyperbole in conversation. What one can say is that the impact of Mrs Miniver was both a cause and an effect of the sea-change in American opinion during the summer of 1940. Opinion polls in the ...”

“... With Don McKinlay, a painter whom she fell for over a bottle of vodka when he was brown in white trousers. With Alan Sharp, a novelist and playwright: Alan arrives at 6.30. A hearty discussion on Anglo-Saxon dictionerys. At eight a meal. Bed. Then chat on the novel in English life. Then Salvation Army lore, then a whole two hours of Scottish ...”

“... sceptical and defensive. In the later image, from around 1890, Ernestine’s now lined face and white hair are framed by a thick velvet blanket. Her look is tender; she holds a few violets, which rest on her lips. Nadar’s particular contribution to the development of photography was his exploitation of the new wet collodion process, invented in 1851 ...”

“... a person, as Heidi had. The tighty-whities were what had unlocked it for her. Cranston – Walter White in Breaking Bad – standing with his legs spread against that desert background, his head full of chemical equations. To write for someone’s capabilities, or even just a little beyond them. He would be perfect, Heidi said. It would be transcendent. It ...”

“... accurately as possible. Crippen certainly didn’t want any more children. Charlotte’s brother, William, would later say that she’d written to her family before her death, from their new home in Salt Lake City, to tell them that Crippen was forcing her to have abortions. She had already submitted to ‘two dangerous cuttings’ when she wrote: ‘My ...”

“... of the poem suggests a quite dissimilar literary world, toughly at ease with its own brutalities. William Pritchard has written well on the vivacity the younger Larkin learned (with Auden, it has to be added, as a forerunner) from the playful rhythms and rememberable idioms of dance-music lyrics. His cool plotting and harshly humorous caricatures seem to me ...”

“... against the racially mixed society of contemporary America. The Oklahoma bomber was reading William Luther Pierce’s The Turner Diaries, a novel about the white revolution against Jews, Blacks and Hispanics. Although some of these reactionary messianisms draw on apocalyptic literature, their vision of the future is ...”

“... crit. ‘The Return of the Little Black Dress’ is one chapter title, another, ‘The Women in White’, yet another, ‘Scarlet Women’ (and yes, it seems, they really do eat men like air). Emily Dickinson’s white dress is noted (though not Gilbert and Gubar’s eerie aside about the unexpectedly enormous size of a ...”