“... his closest friends were fellow exiles. In the Trobriand Islands, he spent more time with white traders than he later admitted. Escaping from a ‘surfeit of niggs’, he lodged for weeks at a time in the rowdy compound of the pearl trader Billy Hancock. Hancock’s wife was the daughter of another trader, Mick George, and his Trobriand ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Samurai (1990), and doesn’t bear much resemblance to Anglophone theory-novels along the lines of Gilbert Adair’s The Death of the Author (1992). As a comic extravaganza it salutes David Lodge, whose character Morris Zapp gets a walk-on part. But for Binet, riffing knowingly on narrative theory isn’t an end in itself. As well as being a kind of ...”

“... postcards in seedy Parisian bars, and for a while he seems set to become the novel’s Gilbert Osmond, the North American made louche and decadent by prolonged exposure to Europe. But he disappears from the narrative. The owner of the chateau refers to a ‘drama’ that has resulted in the decline of the family, but this is also ...”

“... it in January, it was overrun by brambles; much of its balustrading had been kicked away; its four white marble columns had long since been heaved off (the nearby railway line their likely destination); and the temporary metal fence surrounding it was more of an eyesore than a protection. Soane designed the monument in 1816, originally as a memorial to his ...”

“... kind of job and are bound to get to the real boss, ten to one you are brought up against a little white-faced Jew in a bath-chair with an eye like a rattlesnake. Yes, sir, he is the man who is ruling the world just now.’Hannay is sceptical about the ‘Jew-anarchists’ but notes that his neighbour’s tales of international financiers stirring up chaos for ...”

“... where surf breaks like a plasterer ‘smoothing fresh cenotaphs’ and Sandpipers burst like white notes from a ceremonial band. Walcott has hot news from the Caribbean: ‘unrest’, ‘governments falling’, ‘junta and coup d’état, the newest Latino mood’. But he doesn’t find the changes heart-warming. The theme of ‘The Spoiler’s ...”

“... books. Is Satan good or bad? Why exactly did Iago hatch his plot, or Isabel Archer decide to marry Gilbert Osmond? Such speculations need the exercise of just as much intelligence as does the higher jargon, and for most people they are more fun to make. Dr Spacks ends her preface with the comment that although the ambiguities and perplexities associated with ...”

“... 19th-century section, from Hood and Praed and Calverley through Lear and Carroll and then W. S. Gilbert on to Belloc and Chesterton. Indeed, almost all of the book’s second half is shandy, exceedingly good of its kind – but that kind is essentially different from the real thing in the first half. And the mixing of the two causes restlessness in the ...”

“... for some while now to admit to being bored by the huge, flat, ‘pure’ abstracts on the white walls of the museums of modern art. And yet non-representational paintings on a fairly large scale seem still to be what art students are most encouraged to make. Critics now incline to applaud in them evidence of a strenously physical relationship with ...”

“... smart, soothing, sublimely pretty wallpaper muzak for an Alpine sanatorium, redolent of clean white walls, dandelion salad, mineral water, quiet cerebral games of chess – plenty of luxe and calme, but not much volupté. I don’t get the obsessive fandom Kraftwerk generate, which seems only to increase by the year. The mass freak-out among people I knew ...”

“... dropsy. There were further indignities. In 1810, a menagerie owner called Mr Brookes imported a ‘white camel’ to Britain. The beast was a ‘novelty’ in London, but Brookes wanted it to be ‘still more novel’ and ‘caused it to be artificially spotted and produced it to the public as a camelopard’. (The fraud was discovered by some ‘scientific ...”

“... in a child’s alphabet book, even a dominatrix of pornographic fantasy. As Munich reads them, the Gilbert and Sullivan operas are haunted by her presence, and so too is Rider Haggard’s She, whose deathless queen has a familiar habit of sleeping in close proximity to the mortal remains of her consort. Even biological barriers prove no impediment to the ...”

“... devastating analysis of the placing of Frith’s Derby Day between Wyndham Lewis’s The Crowd and Gilbert and George’s Red Morning Troubles, is a famously provocative writer who sometimes seems to go on the attack just for the hell of it. But I have not talked to a single soul about this hang who is less violently opposed to it then ...”

“... crit. ‘The Return of the Little Black Dress’ is one chapter title, another, ‘The Women in White’, yet another, ‘Scarlet Women’ (and yes, it seems, they really do eat men like air). Emily Dickinson’s white dress is noted (though not Gilbert and Gubar’s eerie aside about ...”