“... were his antlers). I found the Family Romance of King Arthur, particularly as reincarnated in T.H. White’s Sword in the Stone, in the magic weapon that no one but Harry can wield, and in the gift of talking to animals, that White’s Merlin gives to Arthur (Harry just does snakes). Where Mary Poppins gave the children a ...”

“... Brigade is another – that the British seem almost to revel in, even to gain strength from. As Peter Cook said in Beyond the Fringe, ‘we need a futile gesture at this stage. It will raise the whole tone of the war.’ The general verdict today is that it could never have worked. The strategy was foolish and hopeless. One major of the Gurkhas thought that ...”

“... the nation. The Victorian invention of the lobby correspondent, a role filled by men like William White or Henry Lucy, brought parliamentary debates alive for the newspaper reader. The correspondents usually did this by dwelling on the MPs’ individuality: their mannerisms, their dress, their hobby-horses. This humanised the institution and undermined ...”

“... different times (and by different factions at the same time) of being a terrorist, a centrist, a White agent, a Nazi agent, a Stalinist agent, a social democrat, a Trotskyist, even (gulp) a Gaullist. After his death in 1947 he was forgotten for decades, being useless to either side in the Cold War – all probity and no PR. Susan Weissman is even more ...”

“... time.’ When she was permitted her first prison visit in 1781, he was distraught at the revealing white dress and meticulously curled hair that she wore to give him pleasure. He became horribly jealous, and was convinced that as part of a plot by her mother, she was having an intrigue with a Provençal manservant. At other times his messages resembled those ...”

“... Knussen recognised the affinity, and coupled poems by Trakl and Plath in his Second Symphony, and Peter Maxwell Davies has also set Trakl to music. This new collection is the most substantial so far published in England, and should finally win Trakl wider recognition. Alexander Stillmark’s selection of around 125 poems, including most of the major ones, is ...”

“... if technically difficult way to decorate a Gothic building, was obtained from the German painter Peter von Cornelius. Hugely popular exhibitions of potential schemes were held in Westminster Hall and much discussed, for the public expected a lot for their money. The scheme was supposed to encourage artists, educate visitors, stimulate the members of the ...”

“... Frankenstein … obsessed with one xenophobic idea’. ‘There was disquiet across the white world,’ de Bellaigue writes, at Mossadegh’s ‘show of Oriental bad form’. The Foreign Office started a campaign to persuade the American public of the rightness of the British cause and the US press duly fell in with it. The New York Times and the ...”

“... there earlier this year while waging ‘a defensive war’. It was a mark of Peter Hain’s extreme unpopularity in the Labour Party – he came fifth for the deputy leadership in an unimpressive field of six – that he had to find someone across the Atlantic to defend him over his undeclared donations, as Evans did last year. More ...”

“... a man who interprets the view for him (‘It is the grey-haired mountain. Abyad! Its turban is white’) on a hilltop overlooking Damascus: ‘Will you not be going down to the city?’ the man asked suddenly. He had joined me as I was climbing the hill, and his curiosity had not been satisfied. ‘How long do you stay in Damascus?’ ‘I don’t ...”

“... Meanwhile, historians and polemicists, inspired by new theories about the Caucasian origin of white humans, hailed the Germans as the central, Aryan actors of human history – and identified the Jews as their hereditary opponents, stodgy, shifty and subhuman. The story reaches its deeply ironic conclusion in the 20th century. Tacitus, whom Milton called ...”

“... must have been Lola Montez.’ Admirers mentioned her air of refinement, her tapered fingers and white hands, her duchessy way of carrying herself. The Morning Post praised her ‘almost faultless’ foot and ankle. Some people spoke adoringly of her ‘mice teeth’, an attribute whose charms have not survived. Some of Lola’s other features were more ...”

“... not in the core countries of capitalist development, but on its margins – among (non-Catholic) white settler societies, in Australasia and the North American Midwest and West, but especially in Scandinavia. (Therborn warns us against simple and unilineal models of the relations between economic and cultural transformation, apart from the patent economic ...”

“... many writers who were drawn to use the story in one way or another, among them Trollope, Patrick White, Robin Maugham and Julian Symons, just as Dumas, and Boublil and Schönberg, have pounced on the story of Martin Guerre, and Verlaine, Georg Trakl and Peter Handke, not to mention a dozen playwrights and film-makers, have ...”

“... did Chagall really belong ‘among the very great artists of our time’, as the museum curator Peter Selz thought, or was he, as Arthur Danto puts it, ‘overproductive, repetitive and shallow’? Naive, or a self-consciously calculating opportunist? The canny ‘manager of his own fairyland’ (Jean Cassou), or a painter who carefully cultivated his image ...”