“... She recounts how sperm donation was invented in 1884 by the prominent Philadelphia physician William Pancoast, who inseminated a chloroformed and totally unsuspecting patient with the semen of his ‘best-looking’ medical student, and only later informed her husband – who agreed that his now happily pregnant wife should remain ignorant rather than ...”

“... of draught animals nor of the wheel. The Anasazi also produced beautiful pottery decorated with white and black geometric designs, built sophisticated irrigation systems and erected astronomical and solar observatories. Man Corn, however, makes no attempt to deal in detail with any of these aspects of Anasazi society. Instead, it concentrates ...”

“... Victorian literary and artistic worlds: his maternal grandfather was Ford Madox Brown, his uncle William Michael Rossetti. The only possible career for the children of these classes was that of a genius. Ford’s Rossetti cousins had written Greek dramas at the ages of five, nine and fourteen respectively. It became his duty always to aspire to ...”

“... voice in the Wilson and Callaghan years of Labour government, a time not only of the notorious ‘white heat of technology’ but of huge expansion and transformative innovation in higher and further education. Unlike other academic historians, he actually changed the institutions and practices of his country, as well as emitting a cataract of written history ...”

“... Coates’s Isokon building. It was also in Camden in the late 1960s and early 1970s that this white-walled, abstract, often low-rise high modernism was emulated in social housing, in extraordinary projects such as Alexandra Road or Highgate New Town. This was the first part of the capital – and the country in general – to open itself up to the new ...”

“... it might be a clothesline, ‘old and dark grey’: ‘It had burst open and was giving up its white pith.’ Or it might be a locker room, where ‘hair pieces like Skye terriers waited for their masters’; or a courtroom, where a lawyer called Cannibal Pinsker has ‘a large yellow cravat that lay on his shirt like a cheese omelette’; or an old ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... are part-African’, Mechal Sobel argues that in 18th-century Virginia, despite the tyranny of white over black, cultural interaction occurred constantly. ‘Work became essentially a black domain, and working whites worked in it.’ On ‘King’ Carter’s estates in the 1730s, 1000 black slaves toiled under eight ...”

“... decades since Moss was photographed by Corinne Day for the Face, those instantly iconic black and white images of a skinny 16-year-old on Camber Sands, wearing no make-up and very few clothes, grinning through her freckles and pointy teeth, all at once so English, so ordinary and so glamorous. And it’s four decades since David Bowie – wearing a lot of ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”