“... of sulphate aerosols in Greenland ice cores fell in the 1990s. A British scientist, Professor Michael Grubb of Imperial College, London, first suggested that these two unlikely successes might become the models for a worldwide assault on global warming. Guilty gases could be identified, targets and times negotiated for their reduction, and nations coming ...”

“... she favoured black silk cloaks and trousers, tricorn hats, blood-red lipstick and cadaverish white face-powder – Tallulah Bankhead was not the only acquaintance to nickname her ‘Countess Dracula’. Yet such was de Acosta’s sinister allure she managed to bed just about everybody who was anybody in the sapphic world of her time: from Isadora ...”

“... at school, a jersey and skirt at training college, ‘my schizophrenic fancy dress’, a ‘white smock, white shoes and a starched cap’, things made of weird new fabrics such as ‘everglaze’, a longed-for skirt of ‘terylene’ with permanent pleats, a ‘dull green overcoat’, the slacks Sargeson preferred ...”

“... me. Everywhere dog shit dogs must have important freedom to shit everywhere. With a flash of wide white cuff, he taps the page of figures on Harry’s desk. Too much disorder. Too much dog shit. Pay by end of August, no prosecution for criminal activities. But no more Toyota franchise at Singer Motors. Japanese perplexity awakening to contempt dismisses ...”

“... a little thunderous, but not to the point of Mannerism, nor are his figures as stagey-grotesque as Michael Ayrton’s were. His line and colour are tart – compared with illustrations commissioned for cookery books today, almost brutal – but the world they create is welcoming. Before market research quantified the effectiveness of commercial art, and fine ...”

“... for his own work, and the start of an important – perhaps his most important – friendship. Michael Ramsbotham was also a writer, five years younger than Henry Reed, and from a more privileged background. After Charterhouse, from which he was expelled, he went up to King’s College, Cambridge. At the end of his second year, in June 1940, he was called ...”

“... the most prominent prize for first novels in Australia; it was described by David Marr, Patrick White’s biographer, as ‘astonishingly talented’, and by Jill Kitson of the ABC as ‘a searingly truthful account of terrible wartime deeds that is also an imaginative work of extraordinary redemptive power’. Assuming, as we all did, that the novel ...”

“... converting a house for their retirement. The Greens are so entirely married they even look alike: white-haired, spry, with candid blue eyes. They will prove Monti’s pattern only partial, for in their case it’s the dream house that’s going to crumble, not the dream itself, which is the fabric of their relationship. They’re wrestling ineptly with ...”

“... not be allowed to put one off reading it. All the economic reasons for not producing black and white pocket catalogues are obvious, and I own and pore over illustrated art books. But I am also sure that paintings sometimes need to be defended from apparatus which seems to celebrate them, but really confuses the relationship which matters most – that ...”

“... who speaks of ‘a witness to the truth, not of God, but of our unwillingness for God’: reading Michael Edwards’s statement in multi-racial Britain in 1985, I wonder at its exclusive, ethnically-biased use of ‘our’ and ‘God’. Edwards employs the words in a manner which assumes the existence of a white Christian ...”

“... His sentences are as pungent and as full of character as his music’ etc) and as described by Michael Tanner in the letter pages of this journal as ‘the greatest English prose of our time, I think’ (LRB, 3-16 February 1983), is Craft’s prose. Craft’s essayistic prose is indistinguishable from what is ostensibly Stravinsky’s in his answers to ...”

“... the war, which generated an identity of interest between professional groups – public servants, white-collar workers – and the more traditionally organised manual workers, and which was, in the course of time, to enhance the political power and influence of the trade-union movement more than anything else. Sir Denis takes up the story in more detailed ...”

“... and roundness of flesh with red chalk; and finally half-cancelling and illuminating the forms with white. Even when he drew from a model he made it respond to other figures so that in his finest compositions each component works in rhythm with all the others. Studies by him of life – the world outside the studio – are unknown. There are, it is true, very ...”

“... of a pretty girl. She might be a Kurd, but maybe not, the report does not say. Then there is a white girl, who could be from anywhere between Moscow and San Francisco; a black boy, probably from Africa, possibly Birmingham; a Malay or Indonesian boy; another boy who I think is South American, but don’t hold me to it, he could be an Arab; and a girl I can ...”

“... the California Covid-19 Testing Task Force, Admiral Brett Giroir (the US testing tsar) and the White House task force (two guys sharing a bedsit in San Francisco). We suggested to executives at Apple that we could regularly test all ten thousand employees at their UFO-shaped building near San Jose. Great idea, they replied. We talked to Anne Wojcicki, the ...”