“... well have been allowed a gentler landing. But he was not any of those things: he was a Westerner, white trash, didn’t go to college, and worst of all, was a California phenom, a national success, the literary darling of the young. The long knives were well due in making an appearance. Brautigan came from the Pacific Northwest, born in Tacoma, Washington in ...”

“... that grease the gears of his or her everyday life. Feminists know this all too well: 19th-century white women opposed to being ‘treated like slaves’ remained unmoved by the enslavement of black women (and men); some women who insist on fair salaries at the office try to pay as little as they can to the people who look after their children and clean their ...”

“... over. The Palais de Chaillot and the 1937 exhibition meant to assert that man, and not only the white man, was the sum of his creations. If the calculation was correct, and it was looking decidedly wobbly, there would be peace between peoples. By 1940 Hitler, something of an expert on peoples, was being photographed on the esplanade of the Palais. (That’s ...”

“... of sensation could have dreamed up. It was a case that fascinated the eminent physician Sir William Osler, who compiled his own dossier on Barry, as well as the sexologist Havelock Ellis, who included Barry in his roster of distinguished instances of transvestism. Barry served the British army as a surgeon for 45 years, rising to the position of ...”

“... soft tonal possibilities, he would not have devised his singular printmaking technique. Stanley William Hayter, the seminal British printmaker – a chemist by training – who had taught the Surrealists in Paris and the Abstract Expressionists in New York, had returned to Paris in the early 1950s. Guided by Hayter, Arikha developed a method of imprinting ...”

“... the Fontana, the emulsion-on-hardboard multi-head portraits on which a generation of uncatalogued white moulds are breeding. The manifestos have been composed. It’s the time of the Art Wars (1990-93), and Tony Lowes, Philosopher, asserts that ‘to save the starving we must give up art.’ Wittgenstein, apparently, was of the same mind. That’s what it ...”

“... more than two years before and had even put out a press statement in early 1973 which stated that William McGrath, head of the sinister Orange private army, TARA, was using ‘a non-existent evangelical mission as a front for his homosexual activities and also runs a home for children’ – whose address and phone number Wallace conveniently supplied. No ...”

“... in the Thirties, he made Hollywood, its gods and goddesses, its imaginary America of swing, white telephones and good-sport girls, his myth of the desirable centre. His first published writing, he admitted; was a letter sent to a film magazine when he was ten, asking the Warner Brothers for more of Humphrey Bogart, just seen in The Petrified Forest. His ...”

“... between himself and Mailer, himself and Capote, himself and Tennessee Williams, or himself and William Buckley. Rather, we learn, not without preceding markers but in many ways for the first time, about Vidal’s family and about the Kennedy branch of it. We come to understand how divided a self he is; not just as between love and death but as between ...”

“... in days to come      Dream unashamed of these!While this is not exactly a call to take up the white man’s burden, the adjective ‘unashamed’ does push back firmly against incipient imperial guilt and the rhetoric of decolonisation.The Complete Poems of Walter de la Mare, published in 1969, runs to almost nine hundred pages and includes more than a ...”

“... I come across a note of when Mary-Kay and her children, Sam and Will, came round to supper. ‘William in particular is very polite, manfully tackling a stew which he doesn’t like and finishing it. “Thank you very much,” he says as he gets up. “I actually prefer my vegetables raw.” He also talks of Leonora da Vinzi and lists his inventions: the ...”

“... Memorial Theatre at Stratford-on-Avon was closed. But around 11 a.m. a girl called Eileen White noticed ‘an awful lot of smoke’ pouring from the back of the building. When she told her aunt she was reassured that it was only ‘Mr Gisbourne’s bonfire’. An hour later, the theatre manageress, Alice Rainbow, was finally warned that the building ...”

“... the development of a democratic literate culture’. More recently, Derk Bodde and William Hannas have claimed that the Chinese writing system inhibits creativity and the capacity for independent thought. These are corollaries of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, which holds, in its strongest forms, that language limits thought. A language ...”

“... that when he became a hat designer, at scarcely twenty years old, he did so semi-anonymously as ‘William J.’ and ‘William Jay’. We see his overwhelming desire to be close to women’s clothes transmuted into the need to know everything about them. He doesn’t reflect on how a flamboyant maker became a self-effacing ...”

“... by the former Conservative Party chairman Ben Elliot. Starmer’s former chief of staff, Sam White, went to Flint Global, where his boss is James Purnell, who served as a minister under Gordon Brown. Flint claims to offer its clients – which include Meta, Amazon and Uber – ‘unparalleled insight into how Labour thinks and works’. The former home ...”