“... 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 ...”

“... of Art Masterpieces: with Fouquet’s Agnès Sorel as the Virgin, where the sitter’s globular white breast thrusts it-self provocatively out at the viewer above a tightly-laced bodice; and with Grünewald’s green, twisted, lacerated body of Christ on the Cross, which, since it figured suffering and Christianity, both outside the pale in my progressive ...”

“... he was the sixth most caricatured individual in Britain; and only three other politicians, William Pitt the Younger, Charles James Fox and North, featured in prints more. Yet, as Robinson points out, before 1778 visual representations of Burke were rare: and this is suggestive. In retrospect, Burke’s speeches in the 1760s and early 1770s, warning of ...”

“... you can take a gene coding for a specific antibody from one highly inbred strain of mice (white) and stick it into the fertilised egg of another strain (black). That ‘transgene’ comes to be carried in each cell of the host mouse’s body, and you can easily see why there should be much practical as well as conceptual interest in exactly what the ...”

“... initialled Amergin. This ur-bard’s ‘Alphabet Calendar’ receives an ingenious reading in The White Goddess, Muldoon reminds us, where its Protean swagger (‘I am a stag: of seven tines/I am a flood: across a plain’) is shown to conceal an alphabet of druidic tree-lore. Amergin probably wouldn’t have recognised the Roman alphabet; Ogham would have ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... nor his friends readier for bold adventure on a Saturday free of school than all did in the ‘white town drowsing’ on the Missouri shore of the mighty Mississippi River where Mark Twain in the 1840s drank deeply of the sweetness of life, and never forgot it. ‘Free’ was a word of powerful attraction for Twain. His friend Tom Blankenship enjoyed a ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... resulting trial of the pro-Darwin teacher John Scopes pitted the attorney Clarence Darrow against William Jennings Bryan, the ex-Populist and fervent evangelical. Bryan, who had been secretary of state in Woodrow Wilson’s first administration, was persuaded to take the stand as a witness for the truth of the Bible; Darrow delighted his captive audience of ...”

“... the era of the Civil War. We therefore need to recalibrate our assessment of the violence between white protagonists so as to open our eyes to the far darker realities of ethnic division. And furthermore – though he doesn’t quite say as much – he seems to think that by putting the Civil War in its proper place on the scale of destruction we can also ...”

“... deaths in both countries, with ethnic minorities heavily overrepresented. Meanwhile, rage against white supremacism is exploding on American streets. Whatever the fate of these uprisings, the largest since the 1960s, a period of devastation lies ahead. Tens of millions of people are likely to lose their livelihoods and their dignity.As a general insurrection ...”

“... Crowley, Hermann Hesse); they had been to obscure movies (Herostratus by Don Levy, Black God, White Devil by Glauber Rocha) and customised their TV intake with the ease of any digital-era couch potato. They also had conspicuous specialisms which anticipated the age of identity management and served them well in later life: they hung on, by and large, to ...”

“... translation of a book by the Danish archaeologist P.V. Glob, which was full of striking black and white images of their strange, patient faces – ‘Donatello-like’, Bernard O’Donoghue once said – the beauty of which Glob celebrated in what was in the English version slightly fruity prose: ‘Majesty and gentleness still stamp his features as they did ...”