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“... to be the focal point from Telford’s refuge, are invisible, except for the odd glimpse of white water; in summer nothing whatever can be seen. A plaque, unveiled in 1996 by the parliamentary under-secretary of state for Wales, and commemorating George Borrow’s enjoyment of what he described as ‘one of the wildest and most beautiful scenes ...”

“... as revealing as they seem. He may have been inspired by the multiple narrators of The Woman in White: like witnesses presenting their evidence the characters contradict and expose themselves. Agatha Christie’s famously unfair mystery, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, is written as a diary, proving just how unreliable ‘honest’ narrators can be. Sayers ...”

“... They were animated not so much by Voltaire’s regard for the modernising zeal of the heirs of Peter I, but by the belief that it was Russia’s very ‘barbarism’, its proximity to the despotic rule and military virtue of the nomadic Scythians described by Herodotus, that made it the perfect agent for the regeneration of Europe. In a continent already ...”

“... both grandfathers and his father were successful, well-regarded doctors. The physician’s white coat, as Stern writes, ‘was the one uniform of dignity to which Jews could aspire and in which they could feel a measure of authority and grateful acceptance’. Although medicine was in the 19th century, as it is today, far from a pure science, it held ...”

“... that I saw him in grainy photos posted by ex-pupils on Friends Reunited. Was he not the boy in the white shirt at the edge of a photograph taken in front of the school in 1980, with kids tumbling over each other and somebody spraying from a shook-up can?He tended to do well in class but on a report card for July 1978 you can see things were changing. His ...”

“... In these supposed terrae nullius, the original inhabitants had as much reason to fear the white man’s theodolite and chain as his guns and muskets. The banker followed on the heels of the surveyor, for a secure title is the best security for a loan and the farmer needed cash for seeds and tools and livestock. The bank loan and the land registry ...”

“... up costs and cultivating relations with the trade press. He successfully posed as the ‘white, non-Jewish knight’, convincing Photoplay that he would ‘endow the febrile motion-picture industry with an atmosphere of Americanism and substantiality’. After three years juggling three companies, he sold nearly all his holdings and took $2.5 million ...”

“... view of Shakespeare’s national allegiance was eloquently summed up by another Philadelphian, Peter Markoe, in 1786: Monopolising Britain! Boast no more His genius to your narrow bounds confin’d; Shakespeare’s bold spirit seeks our western shore, A gen’ral blessing for the world design’d, And, emulous to form the rising age, The noblest Bard ...”

“... in the British Year Book of International Law, Vol. 9, 1928, at first appeared winded (Peter Beck, Guardian, 26 July, has since I wrote this revealed that the review was a Foreign Office plant and that ‘C.D.’ was Sir Cecil Hurst, the Foreign Office’s chief legal adviser. Corps Diplomatique?). According to D.C., ‘although the reader may, on ...”

“... Commons dining-room.I play Sillery, now 80, though I can’t say I adjust the acting to the age, a white wig doing most of the work. I am supposed to be entertaining, or being entertained by, a group of young MPs, my only line being: ‘I will mention your name to the Italian Ambassador. I’m dining with him tomorrow night at Diana Cooper’s.’ Most of the ...”

“... they condoned – how thoroughly he’d known Algeria and how strongly he’d objected to the white man’s dealings with the ‘natives’. Algerian Chronicles was in production at Gallimard when La Question, Henri Alleg’s devastating book about the use of torture in Algeria, appeared out of the blue from Les Editions de Minuit. Minuit’s credentials ...”

“... en route home I generally stop and have some tea at Bettys in Ilkley where I also buy an organic white loaf. Today the assistant tells me that the café (and presumably the four or five other branches in the Bettys chain) no longer does organic produce as they’ve changed their flour miller. ‘However,’ she assures me, ‘the flour is locally ...”

“... Eventually they were let in to view the corpse of the murdered woman, her forehead wrapped in the white ribbon of the Orthodox rite, her body, slight enough anyway, diminished by the flower-encrusted bier. Around the edges of the mortuary chamber, garlands from the media that attacked her while she was alive stood thick alongside wreaths from her children and ...”

“... I found the sight of district nurses in their navy blue raincoats both reassuring and appropriate. White coats have gone too now, with doctors indistinguishable from patients except that the doctors are in shirt-sleeves. I like white coats. But then I’m a butcher’s son. White coats ...”

“... all those tumbling, ambiguous green metaphors. Inundation, crushed lungs, steepling walls of white water, Frankenstein’s monster liberated from his Arctic prison, cities swallowed in the chilling rush. The fears were out. Weather as threat, like Larkin’s sexual intercourse, began with the Beatles. It was canonised from the pulpit by Gregory Bateson ...”