“... at school, a jersey and skirt at training college, ‘my schizophrenic fancy dress’, a ‘white smock, white shoes and a starched cap’, things made of weird new fabrics such as ‘everglaze’, a longed-for skirt of ‘terylene’ with permanent pleats, a ‘dull green overcoat’, the slacks Sargeson preferred ...”

“... or so after the interview in Manhattan, I was arrested by a vision of scarlet socks covering frail white calves beneath billowing Bermuda shorts: not, at that era, a part of the expected scene on Nassau Street in Princeton. It was Artur Sergeevich, now removed from New York to live on Linden Lane, in the Mediterranean villa provided by the philosopher Jacques ...”

“... the reader through the public furores – the outcry over her 1966 pronouncement that ‘the white race is the cancer of human history,’ for example, used as a cudgel against her by conservative foes until their arms went numb – and developments in her personal life familiar from previous biographies, memoirs and profiles. While not stinting on ...”

“... would-be agent of incestuous retribution is a young man, part Negro but easily passing for white, named Charles Bon. Close to the beginning of the Civil War, Bon discovers that by his partially Negro mother in Haiti, he is the never acknowledged, even if financially assisted, son of the now remarried, immensely propertied Mississippi planter Thomas ...”

“... clothes. It was the failure to disclose such material which led to the wrongful conviction of Judith Ward and the Birmingham Six, among others, and those scandals led to a liberalisation of the disclosure process. Governed at the time by the common law, the regime was altered in the early 1990s by the judiciary, without any need for legislation. Despite ...”

“... and in a work of 1988, Dotty Attie made little copies of bits of Caravaggio’s painting of Judith and Holofernes – thus cutting up a picture of someone cutting someone else up. A good deal of contemporary art appears to be designed to attract the sort of exegesis found in Bal’s book, and in Bersani and Dutoit, but Caravaggio’s paintings deserve ...”

“... us in touch’ with them? Does proximity mean intimacy? How does the picture’s black, white and grey monochrome affect our looking? Does it put back distance – detachment – into the scene, however near and enormous individual bodies may seem? Where is the ground in Guernica? Do we have a leg (or a tiled floor) to stand on? Literally we do ...”

“... since any sophisticated account of pleasure shares a boundary with elegy.By the time of Edmund White’s The Farewell Symphony, published just under a decade later, the world of Aids seemed all-engulfing, a maze with only one exit. The finale of Haydn’s Symphony No. 45, nicknamed ‘The Farewell’, was supposedly a sidelong intervention into court ...”

“... I heard that the family of an American soldier killed in Iraq receives $12,000. I heard that the White House had deleted the chapter on Iraq from the annual Economic Report of the President, on the grounds that it did not conform with an otherwise cheerful tone. Within a week in January I heard Condoleezza Rice say there were 120,000 Iraqi troops trained to ...”

“... transfer to a psychiatric ward. He died a few days later in hospital.‘An ungrievable life,’ Judith Butler has argued, ‘is one that cannot be mourned because it has never lived, that is, it has never counted as a life at all.’ Butler was talking about people on the ‘wrong’ side of a conflict, but the same applies to prisoners. Everything the ...”

“... she will stand and look at the rubble lining the Arno. And a whole day will pass. After the ‘white troubled dawn’ in the Boboli Gardens of the first lines of the novel, it will be noon (there’s a reference to the South African soldiers who entered the city six hours earlier) and Banti will have taken refuge below in the Palatine gallery of the ...”

“... from a distance of five centuries. Moctezuma remembers just in time to take off his cloak of white goose feathers before appearing in public, since he is ritually required to give away his garments after such occasions and is far too fond of the cloak to let it go. The mayor, who has an appointment with the emperor, makes muffled sounds of distress in ...”

“... newspapers and best investigative reporters (all two of them). Take a long and detailed article by Judith Miller, buried on page 12 of the New York Times: only in the 30th paragraph of 34 do we learn that prewar American Intelligence on Iraqi weapons sites was often ‘stunningly wrong’. In the words of a senior US officer: The teams would be given a ...”

“... which is true – but also that his power and his sexuality are one and the same thing. As Judith Butler has argued, the performative is always melancholic, since the performer knows the role they are enacting is no more than skin deep (‘melancholic’ also because of all the other buried and unconsciously grieved sexual lives one might have led). To ...”

“... a custard-pie violence (‘smack! her sword divorces his codshead from the codpiece’ from ‘Judith’) and a strangely, disarmingly boyish thrall to heroism. You get vivid but cartoonish tropes like the ambush under the bridge (‘Down there, below a bridge, his back on the arch,/Hannibal listens, thoughtful, glorying,/to the dead tramp of the advancing ...”