“... assured was not only Elizabeth’s posthumous reputation, but her greatness in comparison with her Stuart successor. Even Camden, emphasising and extolling her love of peace, could be used to invoke the glorious days of Elizabethan sea-power, exercised against the hated Spaniard, in sharp contrast to James’s friendship with Spain and refusal to fight for his ...”

“... for whom the papers presume to speak turn out, on inspection, to be some fraction or other of the white ‘talking classes’, each ‘we’ is an imperialist, asserting its claim to be taken as the universal, the consensual ‘we’. Yet each ‘we’ can only be given an identity by specifying which groups it excludes, and which registers of ...”

“... beliefs to the Taylors. Though John was only three years older than Sarah, his prematurely white hair and grave demeanour made him a surprising choice for her. His letter of proposal, a ‘strange, joyless document’, as the Hamburgers call it, was unpromising. No fictional would-be husband in Jane Austen, George Eliot or Meredith outdoes Austin in ...”

“... Troost Avenue is a long north-south street that for decades marked the de facto border between white and Black areas of the city. Cleaver hopes to collect enough signatures to trigger a state-wide referendum challenging the redistricting.Democratic states have threatened to retaliate. In California, Governor Gavin Newsom has scheduled a special election on ...”

“... conference convened to allow him to put his spin on the ‘interim report’ just published by the White House’s National Security Council (NSC), he also tried to sell the war in Iraq as a Manichean struggle against al-Qaida. ‘We can’t let al-Qaida gain safe haven inside of Iraq. My attitude is we ought to defeat them there so we don’t have to face ...”

“... The most obvious example is Cool Hand Luke (1967), a prison drama superbly directed by Stuart Rosenberg, whose background was in television, in which he plays a prisoner, beautiful and insouciant in denim, who refuses to submit to the demands of the authorities: ‘Just a lot of guys laying down a lot of rules and regulations’. Luke’s rebellion ...”

“... what a vast place it is – virtually an entire city block and a small town in itself. The late Stuart Burge, the theatre director, was hidden here as an escaped POW in the war, which I took to mean he spent this perilous time in the bosom of the family. Stuart always played this down and now I can see why, as he may well ...”

“... in sacred groves, their totem plants being oak and mistletoe, the latter harvested by druids in white robes wielding golden sickles. Lucan combines the horrific and naturist elements with a much admired account of a grisly sacrificial wood, allegedly destroyed by Caesar in person, thereby overcoming his soldiers’ superstitious fears. Tacitus provides ...”

“... of 1981; and then, in the spring of 1982, conquered the opinion polls as the Argentines ran up the white flag at Port Stanley. So the Thatcherite counter-revolution was launched and the cycle of change had come full circle. It is never too soon to explore the recent past. Findings are bound to be provisional, distorted by current perspectives and hampered by ...”

“... Burke, who has recently lost his job at a university development office, and the ultra-rich Purdy Stuart, now a donor to the university, who could get him that job back. Once upon a time the two of them lived together in a collegiate bohemian squalor that masked their class differences. Milo aspired to be a painter but his ambitions never really passed beyond ...”

“... Tahiti Gauguin in a crumbling Scottish castle. 3. An afternoon with Georges Braque, who, in a white leather jacket, a white tweed cap and a lilac chiffon scarf, allowed me to sit in his studio while he painted a flying bird.’ That self-conscious reduction to a few dazzling elements is typical of Chatwin’s ...”

“... is a minority there, though Bangladeshis, at just over a third of the population, edge out white British people, at 23 per cent. In his 200-page judgment Mawrey took steps to avoid accusations of Islamophobia, declaring that ‘the real losers in this case are the citizens of Tower Hamlets and, in particular, the Bangladeshi community. Their natural ...”

“... from yonder Box.The Tortoise here and Elephant unite,Transform’d to Combs, the speckled and the white.Here Files of Pins extend their shining Rows,Puffs, Powders, Patches, Bibles, Billet-doux.This is a masterly satire on the bathos of global consumerism: objects from all around the world are yoked together by a violence which is deliberately suppressed by ...”

“... and still less, as he hoped when Austen-Leigh died, to elect him Provost. When his old friend Stuart Donaldson used his influence as Master of Magdalene to offer Benson a fellowship there, kind friends took as much of the pleasure out of it as they could by congratulating him on the skill with which Donaldson had done a classic job. It was a time when he ...”

“... poetry: in the Caroline period more than one writer made use of the fact that Charles Iames Stuart is an anagram of ‘Claimes Arthur’s Seat’. Joshua Sylvester addressed James Stuart through the anagram ‘A Just Master’. The later and less complimentary political anagrams cited by Fowler are great: Shirley ...”