“... feelings, the choice at the time was almost non-existent. Smith was a tiny echo from the future. White shirt, dark hair; white background, dark eyes; tiny white equine jewel, dark tie; hands in a cagy gunfighter’s arch over her wide-open heart: this hauntingly simple image anticipated ...”

“... to destabilise Syria and that these efforts continued into the Obama years. In December 2006, William Roebuck, then in charge of the US embassy in Damascus, filed an analysis of the ‘vulnerabilities’ of the Assad government and listed methods ‘that will improve the likelihood’ of opportunities for destabilisation. He recommended that Washington ...”

“... an infantry officer in superbly-cut uniform, stationed between the pile of his discarded top hat, white waistcoat and silver-topped cane and a mighty shell-burst labelled ‘WAR’. Again, one of the mushroom-growths of the war was ‘Reconstruction’. Asquith appointed a small Reconstruction Committee, and Lloyd George enlarged it into an entire ...”

“... out of which Iain Sinclair’s writing comes. Before he moved into fiction with his first novel, White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings, in 1987, Sinclair had already been publishing his own, extraordinary poems, his own, extraordinary researches into the secret history of London, with a tiny press he ran from his own East London home, for a good twelve years. He ...”

“... depleted guerrilla fighters. Two influential dramas, Larry Kramer’s The Normal Heart and William Hoffman’s As Is, compared people with Aids to the Jews suffering Nazi persecution. This comparison has the virtue of rather brutally illuminating the moral condition of those who watch the catastrophe with detachment. Yet the metaphors of combat and ...”

“... for public attention, rather than acting as the spokesmen for inherently incompatible values. William Wordsworth, whose essays and prefaces originated much of the rhetoric of high-cultural debate, distinguishes between a taste for poetry – which involves active mental participation by the reader – and one for ‘rope-dancing, or Frontiniac or ...”

“... And one can see that they perpetuate (if that is the word) the original distinction between the white Downtown and the adjacent black area which serviced it. Later, I find myself questioning my surge of emotion. Later still, an African-American friend speaks of the place as a kind of disgrace. When I suggest showing it to a friend visiting from England, he ...”

“... that Crane’s poems wouldn’t let you do to them. Crane produced two prodigious books of poetry, White Buildings (1926) and The Bridge (1930), and died at the age of 33 by jumping off a ship bound for New York. After such a brief life and dramatic death he seemed like the very stuff of poetic legend, a Chatterton-and-Rimbaud of his time. He was a famous ...”

“... fought alongside large numbers of indigenous Indians and Southern blacks who viewed the local white settlers and slave-owners as being more dangerous than the imperial authorities in London. Such clashes but also collaborations between different peoples are surely what make imperial history (and we ideally need another name for it) such a compelling and ...”

“... his own report on the extermination at My Lai and sending it to Congress. He told me that, poor white boy as he was (he left school at 14 and was drafted without protest), he had been in basic training when, in the hut one night, a group of good ol’ boys had decided to have some fun with the only black soldier in the detail. The scheme was to castrate ...”

“... in order to get on the road to Waterloo. The church felt proudly ecumenical, as much mosque as white Catholic periscope. The ascent, with spindly handrails, grids of shadow and a looming bell, recalled Hitchcock’s Vertigo. The cold tower was tight and claustrophobic and we struggled to identify the jigsaw of communes through the slats of giant ...”

“... poor Steve, he just has no sense of humour.”’ It was Babitz who put Martin in the white suit that became his trademark.Her preoccupation with getting it right didn’t make her a perfectionist. ‘I have never liked perfect things, they give me the creeps.’ She accosts a man from New York: ‘How can you look like this? You’re so ...”

“... Frederick and Elizabeth’s reign in Bohemia lasted only a year: military defeat at the Battle of White Mountain, outside Prague, prompted their flight into exile in the Dutch Republic, and continental Europe was plunged into the serial conflicts we call the Thirty Years War.From The Hague, Elizabeth spent more than two decades pursuing restitution of her ...”

“... to the shadowy, sooty margins: the focus is on the road in front. There is social variety to match William Frith, but none of his static staginess. Instead, we loom over the shoulder of a young woman, facing the stream; beggars, chatting couples of both sexes, women with children, a soldier signalling in bold red, walk towards us. A gent close to the kerb is ...”

“... paper that although one of her professors at Stanford had been Clinton’s defence secretary, William Perry, her ‘dream job’ was to be national security adviser. She knew Korean and was studying Mandarin: as a student she had published articles about North Korean counterfeiters and smuggling networks. So on paper she fitted in with all the other ...”