“... and it’s a little more so when she makes a real mistake. She twice describes the famous Richard Avedon photograph now called Dovima with the Elephants as containing a ‘long, white dress’. It would seem that she never looked at the picture, since in it the model’s dress is black, and her pale sash isn’t ...”

“... charge’ in letters of 1819, and to her death in 1820, were puzzling until 1936 when Newman Ivey White discovered in Naples the registrations of the birth of Elena Adelaide (Shelley and Mary given as parents), and of her death there in 1820. She had been left in Naples in the care of foster parents. Since the child was not in fact Mary’s, and since Shelley ...”

“... room is suddenly full of emphases: monochrome canvases (late 1950s, early 1960s) in which white is worked into black, wet on wet, so that the surface seems made up of choppy grey erasures. Out of this a black form emerges, uncertainly, because the lattice or matrix of brushstrokes is so uniform throughout. Nonetheless, there is a black floating ...”

“... the scene even more touching. 6 February. I am reading a history of the Yorkshire Dales by Robert White, one of a series, Landscape through Time, published by English Heritage. During the enclosures of the 18th and 19th centuries, most of the land enclosed was added to existing farms, but in 1809 John Hulton used the land allotted to him from the enclosure of ...”

“... again seeks to perplex the eye: on the expanded right-hand side, in the foreground, are the four white-coated painters, poised outside the shopfront of a wine merchant, their two ladders forming an interlocking pattern that climbs nearly to the top of the picture; and then at the squeezed left, the severe vertical of the kerb, shearing away to make a ...”

“... then would have swived the other sister both’. He fought for the invading Tudor forces against Richard III. Unsubstantiated legend has him as a standard-bearer at Bosworth, cut down close to the person of the man who would soon be king. Whatever the exact truth, he died a hero with a claim on the gratitude of the new regime. He did not leave much land for ...”

“... 1956 Sichel moved to Hong Kong, where the agency had its eyes on China and Indonesia. When Richard Bissell, the CIA’s deputy director of plans, proposed sending commandos into China to raise an insurrection against Mao, Sichel told him: ‘Dick, we’d save an awful lot of time and money if we just killed them ourselves.’ He resigned and returned ...”

“... that when he was at prep school Orwell once dressed up as a footman in a red velvet coat and white silk waistcoat. It wasn’t the last time he was to disguise himself as one of the lower orders, but it was squalor he was in search of in the spikes of Paris and London, not wholesome proletarian virtue. Why he was so severely afflicted with this nostalgie ...”

“... the ones that penetrated the hull, were by intellectual formidables such as the critic and editor Richard Poirier, who methodically dismantled Bellow in this paper (after a patronising observation from Atlas about Bellow’s unsure footing when he ventures into ‘the realm of ideas’, Poirier dryly commented: ‘Atlas himself occasionally ventures into the ...”

“... symposium ‘on the Negro’. (Symposia on the Negro were popular in the 1960s, helping to keep white liberal panellists occupied and furrowed until the ferocious later phase of Black Power made them all squirm.) Kazin had been unable to attend the symposium itself but, never one to miss a party, popped into the reception being thrown by Commentary’s ...”

“... is true even in the realm of national security. The principal security threats identified by the White House are WMD proliferation and elusive, non-state terrorist cells dispersed in cities in Western Europe, South-East Asia and throughout the world. But the Department of Defense is no better equipped to handle these problems than to take the lead in ...”

“... ranges of survey data seeking the precise source of his magnetic attraction for the aggrieved white lower-middle and working classes. It will outlast the pundits holding forth on TV, collecting lecture fees and cranking out bestsellers that retail inside dope gleaned, single-sourced and second-hand, from somewhere near the elevators of Trump Tower. It ...”

“... have known but one really dull Bohemian, and I have known a great many clever ones. You know Richard Wagner said that whenever he got dull he went to Prague. “There I renew my youth,” he wrote, “in that magical and volcanic soil of Bohemia.”’ She dramatised the South-West breakthrough in her 1915 novel, Song of the Lark, a book that shed light ...”

“... to be rich: ‘I already owned five fur coats,’ she wrote in her memoir, ‘so I ordered a white mink, floor length, and wore it with pleasure, even if it did make me look like I was rolling along on casters.’ Despite which, as she discovered, she was being paid less than her male colleagues. Muriel meanwhile battled on against headaches, depression ...”

“... leg of a dead Moor. The man awoke to find himself healed, but for the rest of his life, he had one white leg and one black. Not all miracles healed. The saints could also liberate prisoners, bring rain or fair weather, give children to the barren and bring about victory in combat or in court. But when scorned, they wrought ferocious miracles of ...”