“... novels, the last three of which are available in English (from Harvill) as All Souls, A Heart So White and Tomorrow in the Battle Think on Me. All three are admirably translated by Margaret Jull Costa, who not only catches the meanings of words with grace and precision, but gets rhythms of thought, and even better, rhythms of afterthought to carry over into ...”

“... deplore manifestations of ‘people’s power’ and wonder whether they shouldn’t increase VAT. Sam Shilowa, the president of the Congress of South African Trade Unions, is surely right when he says that it is ‘inconceivable’ that the pre-1994 ANC could have come up with its present macro-economic strategy – reduction of the budget deficit from 6 to 3 ...”

“... dire Jim Carrey utopia. The mayor of the city, and the governor of the state, are two mirthless white ethnic conservatives named Giuliani and Pataki. They have restored capital punishment, and encouraged franchising of all sorts while discouraging loitering and littering. Not long ago, a Haitian immigrant named Abner Louima was grabbed outside a funky ...”

“... and her husband, the ‘Duke of Ellington’. The people who told you the stories were always white and they had never heard the commentator themselves; either ‘a friend’ had, or they’d ‘heard’ that it had happened, thus confirming that one, and possibly two, comfortable old South African realities were still in place. In any case such stories ...”

“... her buggered by an Irish builder on the bonnet of a BMW one more time. Meanwhile a gay man like Sam, who runs a cheese shop in the town, can have a tender live-in relationship with handsome Harry that is refreshed rather than undermined by regular orgies, well-run and splendidly catered. As an individual I have a huge vested interest in the viability of gay ...”

“... to King’s College Choir School as a ‘mouldy day-bug’, and here the chaplain, Eric Milner-White, is said to have interested him in religion. Michael certainly took to Milner-White – the inventor of the service of carols and nine lessons – whose photograph was on his wall when he died. There was, at the Choir ...”

“... just arrived, you’re wrong: ‘I was always already here!’, in a ‘sexy brocade cheong-sam/and my enormous prick & balls/showing through dress!’Notley had two sons with her first husband, Ted Berrigan, and her early poems are full of children’s voices. In ‘January’, one asks: ‘Mommy what’s this fork doing?/What?/It’s being Donald ...”

“... never leave, I began to keep a diary of what it felt like to be there in the days of its snowy white disintegration, which felt also like the disintegration of my own mind. My interest was not academic. I did not care about the Singularity, or the rise of the machines, or the afterlife of being uploaded into the cloud. I cared about the feeling that my ...”

“... emporium of wonders, or sociable nexus, in favour of Spartan purity. The unlikely father of the ‘white cube effect’ was Casper David Friedrich, whose studio’s one ornament was a T-square dangling from the wall, a reminder of honest German craftsmanship in keeping with his penchant for woodwork and frame-design. Of course, Friedrich’s brand of mystical ...”

“... included school walkouts and demonstrations by tens of thousands of African American, Hispanic and white pupils; ‘the first gay street protest in America’; anti-Vietnam protests so intense and disastrously policed that they helped persuade Lyndon Johnson not to stand for re-election; extensive activism by the Black Panthers and other Black Power ...”

“... if in spite The TUC does not and the strike’s broken. Foot’s coiffe should go a purer shade of white Unless his fiery gesture was a token To make him look a tough nut in a fight For all those gritty doctrines he has spoken On that day when they have to be renounced And Arthur Scargill’s strike bid must be trounced. But Arthur’s rhetoric is like his ...”

“... enormous bay, its long curving marram strands, its islands and roshans and purple hills with the white quartzy dome of Errigal beyond – we stare out and agree that this must be one of the most beautiful places in the whole world. The moist light moves and zings like a Jack Yeats painting – in a different climate these immense empty strands would be lined ...”

“... feelings, the choice at the time was almost non-existent. Smith was a tiny echo from the future. White shirt, dark hair; white background, dark eyes; tiny white equine jewel, dark tie; hands in a cagy gunfighter’s arch over her wide-open heart: this hauntingly simple image anticipated ...”

“... a way out for Republican leaders in Congress eager to keep a politically paralysed Clinton in the White House without antagonising their most active supporters: fundamentalists believe in redemption through public confession and ‘finding Jesus’. That is why, before the disastrous speech of 17 August, Republicans begged Clinton to apologise with as much ...”

“... combing the beach for rare quartz, rose and amethyst grains amid the millions that are black, white, tan and grey, can a poem be released into the dizzy freedom of the ‘rainbow-bird’ of one of her final poems, ‘Sonnet’, ‘flying wherever/it feels like, gay!’ ‘Writing poetry,’ she declares sternly in a lecture drafted in the 1960s but never ...”