“... as if with an eye to leaving a crisp morsel for the historian. In his 1974 biography of Pepys, Richard Ollard said that there clings to him ‘an irresistible air of bedroom farce’, with ‘furtive lecheries so vivaciously pursued’. The earlier multi-volume life by Sir Arthur Bryant had done much to rescue him from his popular reputation of Slippery ...”

“... their children. Colin Osman is a retired gentleman who lives in Cockfosters. His plumage is white and grey; his eyes are fast-moving; and his body is wonderfully puffed-up and proud. Mr Osman has devoted much of his life to the sport of pigeon-racing, just as his father did, and as his grandfather did before that. It used to be the most popular ...”

“... precision. This, coupled with the memoir form, put me oddly in mind of a book by his contemporary, Richard Rayner. The Blue Suit is also a coming-of-age work with an Oxbridge protagonist and intelligence recruiters in the wings; the two books even mention the same superstar literature don (I shall call him ‘George’, since that is his name). And both, for ...”

“... Robert Peary claiming the North Pole for America, and how, to keep up the morale of his men, Richard Collinson erected a billiard table on the sea-ice of Cambridge Bay. The table was fashioned from snow blocks, the cushions from walrus skin stuffed with oakum. The table surface was a finely-shaved sheet of freshwater ice; the balls were hand-carved from ...”

“... This was the year Bret Harte wrote his ballad, ‘Plain Language from Truthful James’, about two white miners who set out to fleece the simple-seeming Ah Sin in a card-game and found him to be their superior in the art of cheating. The poem was immensely successful, its irony largely missed, and Harte tried to rectify matters with portrayals in a more ...”

“... but it remains a powerful and original work of fiction, especially daring in its depiction of white racist cruelty against Negroes, and in its portrait of a Negro doctor who urges his fellows to ‘throw off the yoke of submission and slothfulness’ and assert their rights as human beings. In rural Georgia, in the late Thirties? It’s no wonder that ...”

“... to accommodate genes and mutations, recent work has been more challenging. Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Lewontin, for example, used the spandrels of St Mark’s in Venice, which exist as a necessary by-product of the process of mounting a dome on rounded arches, as a way of illustrating the anti-adaptationist idea that certain features of organisms have ...”

“... made use of the opening of Russian archives. Over the past decade, secrets have been uncovered,‘white spots’ in the history filled in and new data on a multitude of topics have emerged. The provinces, long invisible, have come back into view. Political actors, past and present, have started to acquire personality and private lives, and ordinary people ...”

“... The trashy references he fills his work with are like scraps torn from magazines, the rough white paper edges proudly out on show: the toothpaste ad in the decision to call his current heroine ‘Susan Colgate’; wrappers, video grabs, an Andy Warhol detail on ‘another American town that bought Tide, ate Campbell’s soup and generated at least one ...”

“... makes his favourite writers sound rather like a squad of marines, or weekend hikers. Writing about Richard Eberhart in 1960, for example, he claimed that ‘Eberhart ... is a prolific writer, so the metaphysical pieces may merely be poetic callisthenics to keep him fit until his next burst of creative energy.’ Of Hugh MacDiarmid in 1962: ‘He has managed a ...”

“... voice. She has, typically, been at once an outsider and a supremely political animal – a white radical in conservative 1940s Rhodesia; in the 1960s, a bitingly reluctant figurehead for the women’s movement; a disenchanted Red who retains a primarily sociological understanding of the individual; a colonial writer edgily occupying a position of ...”

“... back of the room, the smell of mimeographed programme notes. It tells an interesting story, but Richard Koszarski told it better, with more critical and historical acumen, in his 1983 study, The Man You Loved to Hate. There are still some unresolved points in the story, however. Stroheim himself was an unreliable narrator. Only after his death in 1957 did ...”

“... you. The cursor returned and clicked on the second column. Presently a thing like a solid grey-white cauliflower rose until it was a mountain covering all south Manhattan. This is how we bury you. It was the most open atrocity of all time, a simple demonstration written on the sky which everyone in the world was invited to watch. This is how much we hate ...”

“... would be under a more equal system. To show that, we would need to know that even members of the white middle class are much more likely to be jailed in the US than they are in, say, Canada, Israel, New Zealand, Switzerland and Ireland (other countries on the graph). Now it is almost certainly true that white middle-class ...”

“... ran an ‘economic emancipation’ campaign on behalf of the Guptas and Duduzane Zuma attacking ‘white monopoly capital’ – as distinguished, presumably, from the Guptas’ non-white monopoly capital. Europe’s largest software maker, SAP, paid kickbacks to a Gupta front company to get its customer service software ...”