“... factory district. His room was bare and poor, and only packed shelves of books, carefully bound in white paper covers to protect them from smoke and smuts, suggested the bibliophile and the scholar. A pile of novels for review stood on his table, alongside his papers and pencils, and the remains of a cold leg of mutton which, I imagined, had to last the ...”

“... in a Biblical light, though in the past this has lent a certain grandeur to such occasions as Edmund Burke’s denunciation of the British administration in India, Abraham Lincoln’s Second Inaugural and Martin Luther King’s Letter from a Birmingham Jail. We don’t need theology or metaphysics to understand the enduring legacy of slavery or colonial ...”

“... Bibles, liturgies, writings of the Church Fathers and biblical commentaries, he also had works by Edmund Spenser, Michael Drayton, Montaigne, Petrarch, Tasso and Boccaccio. The earl of Leicester’s library at Penshurst included books in many languages on the latest in beekeeping, drainage, poetry, forestry, military strategy, heraldry, optics and ...”

“... This is the radical legend of a Britain run by a reactionary Tory oligarchy that launched a white terror – of hanging, imprisonment and transportation – to suppress native sympathies for the revolution across the Channel. Once again, received assumptions capture an element of truth, but, as Uglow demonstrates, by no means the whole truth. For a ...”

“... You watch your mother slice up a lengthy white radish and boil it over an open fire. The sun has banished the dew, and even unwell as you are, you no longer feel cold.’ The following day, despite your illness – you have hepatitis E; ‘its typical mode of transmission is fecal-oral’ – your parents take you and your older brother and sister from your village to live in the city, ‘the first step to getting filthy rich in rising Asia ...”

“... separate farms where tobacco and grain were the main crops, each worked by slaves directed by a white manager. There were also woodlands teeming with game, experimental gardens, stables, shops for carpenters, blacksmiths and other craftsmen, and a mansion, where Washington and his wife lived, attended by slaves dressed in red and ...”

“... dignity and self-respect, and thinks they have a case against American society – but thinks the white student radicals were just spoilt and ungrateful kids, peeing on the carpet that welcomed them. One of these delinquents, famously photographed during the occupation smoking a cigar, with his feet on the university president’s desk, later called to ask ...”

“... Lincoln’s contribution to the purification of the language has been persuasively discussed by Edmund Wilson: he inspired in others a similar ‘lucidity, precision and terseness’, a better rhetoric, a ‘language of responsibility’. Wilson’s discussion occurs in his study of the literature of the American Civil War, Patriotic Gore, a book which Gore ...”

“... and a bald, merely literal account might run like this ... On the first page the hero appears, Edmund FitzHenry Talbot, an unformed young man of good family who is going out to help govern New South Wales in an aged line-of-battle ship, Captain Anderson commander, and who has been given a book in which to record his journey by his godfather, an influential ...”

“... of debt, direct or indirect, to other writers. For example, he was a lifelong admirer of E.B. White and his correspondence indefatigably quotes White’s colourful definition of a miracle: ‘blue snow on a red barn’. In Lolita, Humbert speaks of ‘our humble blue car and its imperious red shadow’. Of ...”

“... occasion a group of sea captains assured Pepys from personal experience that black corpses ‘look white and lose their blackness’ when drowned at sea. Pepys, the future president of the Royal Society, records this as a piece of interesting scientific trivia, acquired on ‘a fine pleasant walk’ from Greenwich to Woolwich. He doesn’t feel the need to ...”

“... what is more superannuated, more artistically mute and inexpressive, more absurdly camp, than a white marble statue of an old dead dude, surrounded by endless allegorical ladies? How many people have any idea that the first statues you encounter on your entry to the abbey – great stiff white marble men in half-classical ...”

“... not finished. The governess, having gone outside, looks in through the same window and her face ‘white as a sheet’ (like a ghost) frightens Mrs Grose, the housekeeper. Thus the governess’s face does appear in the same frame and is analogically linked to Quint’s. Professor Brooke-Rose follows up this insight with a whole series of ...”

“... After​ reading all of H.P. Lovecraft’s fiction in 1945, Edmund Wilson concluded that there was nothing scary about stories full of words like ‘eerie’, ‘unhallowed’, ‘blasphemous’, ‘infernal’, ‘hellish’ and ‘unholy’, especially when these refer to an ‘invisible whistling octopus’ (the creature appears at the end of the 1928 story ‘The Call of Cthulhu ...”

“... for which Epstein takes – and is usually given – personal credit). The fall came with the white flight from the metropolis to the suburbs, leaving independent booksellers in the cities without walk-in custom. Enter, in 1969, the book chains, serving a ‘malled’ and wheeled America and offering uniform, centrally managed retail outlets whose ...”