“... sky to call his own’. This also has a bearing on exile. His father was of the conservative or ‘white’ wing of the Guelph party, whose members opposed papal influence, and (like Dante, whom he knew) had been banished from Florence in 1302; Petrarch was born two years later in Arezzo and spent his boyhood and youth in Provence. ‘A sense of ...”

“... Centre at Caversham is a treasure trove, but it’s also a labyrinth in which one expects to find white-haired historians still groping myopically along the endless shelves of files, doomed to uncover material so fascinating that all likelihood of ever finishing any work of scholarship has long since passed.If ever there was a historian to whom the phrase ...”

“... in great disrepute, New York was bankrupt, and other American cities were also having trouble with white (tax) flight. Yet the opposite models of the city being put forward in this period left Koolhaas lots of room for manoeuvre. On one side were the Krier brothers (Leon and Rob), who insisted on a return to the historic quartier as the basis of urban planning ...”

“... same’ smell. ‘Lanolin’ is a standard descriptive term for an element in the bouquet of white Burgundies, but I don’t know what lanolin smells like, and my own suggestion would be ‘silage’ or maybe that volatile smell that comes off freshly roasted espresso beans. The routine description of Loire Sauvignon as smelling like gooseberries does ...”

“... single abstention. Unanimity was secured, but a hitch arose at the next stage. The French told the White House that while they could not accept a second Security Council resolution explicitly authorising an attack on Iraq, which would implicate them, they had no objection to a US invasion based on an American interpretation of 1441 – the course that Cheney ...”

“... who gather at Landmark seminars and the Alpha Course. The ones who make the speeches are mostly white and in their thirties and forties (the volunteers on the cameras and boom-mikes are younger and more diverse). They’re more relaxed than they used to be, less aggressive and overtly controlling, but they still have a habit of sitting on panels ...”

“... made the Hole into a camera obscura with lid and lens. The collective painted the walls of the pit white, with gesso and gum. Those who came down the ladder into the earth cell, after their eyes adjusted to the absence of light, found the experience captivating. The world above appeared in phantom form, inverted, a ribbon of articulate shadows, trees like ...”

“... a public unveiling of their amazing new healthcare robot, the Asimo. Asimo is short (4’3”) and white with a black facemask and a metal backpack. It resembles an unusually small astronaut. In the video Asimo advances towards a staircase and starts climbing while turning his face towards the audience as if to say, à la Bender from Futurama, ‘check out my ...”

“... en route home I generally stop and have some tea at Bettys in Ilkley where I also buy an organic white loaf. Today the assistant tells me that the café (and presumably the four or five other branches in the Bettys chain) no longer does organic produce as they’ve changed their flour miller. ‘However,’ she assures me, ‘the flour is locally ...”

“... delicacy to be found in a Constable cloud study as they could possibly be. And he is right: the white clouds in Palmer’s luminously bright cloud pictures (there is one in the Ashmolean, another in Manchester City Art Gallery) are anything but airy and breezy. The Magic Apple Tree struck Herbert as beautiful and peculiar in equal measure: ‘bright crimson ...”

“... stories he told. Only four days after the Birmingham speech, Ann Dummett, wife of the philosopher Michael Dummett and a community relations officer in Oxford, wrote to the Times that the anecdote about the widow from Wolverhampton had been recounted to her in Oxford recently, but about an old lady in London: ‘Almost every circumstantial detail was the ...”

“... mentalities, is an unsuitable subject for monumental treatment. Once through its clinically white portals, however, even the novice will soon realise that here is no sepulchre, although he should equally realise that this is no way to begin. He should begin as Montale would have wished him to, with the individual volumes in Mondadori’s Lo specchio ...”

“... What is this? ‘Two miles behind it a jet of white steam was travelling from the left to the right of the picture.’ It is a train, viewed across a valley, in Jude the Obscure (1895), and it is the only sentence offered there about this train. Flaubert is always described as the great cinematic novelist, the great novelist of detail, and indeed Flaubert has his own described train-steam too – similarly seen, in L’Education sentimentale, across fields, but ‘stretched out in a horizontal line, like a gigantic ostrich feather whose tip kept blowing away ...”

“... were once plentiful in Dublin. I became interested in a gloss on page 1230 which states that ‘Michael Begnal suggests, perhaps not entirely seriously, that she [Martha Clifford, from whom Bloom receives a letter] is actually Ignatius Gallaher.’ This thesis, we learn from the copious bibliography, was first aired by Begnal in the James Joyce Quarterly in ...”

“... the Host into the body of Christ cracked like an egg. In his book Goodbye! Good Men, author Michael Rose writes that the liberalised rules set up a takeover of seminaries by homosexuals.   Vatican II liberalised rules but left the most outdated one: celibacy. That vow was put in place originally because the Church did not want heirs making claims on ...”