“... the way water seemed to me when I was young and still seems now: sustaining, brown, benign – or white, decisive, invigorating, rushing over a weir, churning from the back of a boat. Having been adopted, I was spared the binding notion of blood, with all its passion and fatalism. I simply took the platitude and stood it on its head. I am no longer sure what ...”

“... in the south-western borderlands runs deep into Arizona, and into the defensive imagination of a white majority who take it as a god-given affirmation of the integrity of their state, and of the United States itself. A magnificent and costly border wall – ‘the fence’, ‘the barrier’ – now runs in sections, like a work by Christo and Jeanne ...”

“... Gesina; Rembrandt had Saskia and Hendrickje; and at least one prominent Vermeer scholar, John Michael Montias, has speculated that several of the unknown women in Vermeer’s paintings are the artist’s wife or daughter. Perhaps the order of things was a bit more bourgeois in 17th-century Holland: though biographical data for the Dutch are comparatively ...”

“... paper used in the initial drying process, ‘brown’ for later stages of drying, and a high-white ‘cartridge’ paper for mounting and drawing. Compared to the instrumentation of the physical sciences, this was humble technology, but colonial botanists often lacked such things, and, for that reason alone, Hooker and his metropolitan colleagues could ...”

“... Cassirer and Heidegger. This was also a debate between ‘a Jew and a future Nazi’, as Michael Roubach puts it more bluntly in his essay in The Symbolic Construction of Reality. Melodrama is hard to resist here, although Roubach and Barash, who also has a long essay on the Davos debate and its contexts, play by the rules of scholarly ...”

“... The Homecoming Revolution, an organisation which tries to get émigré South Africans (mainly white professionals) to return home, reports that the combination of World Cup euphoria and austerity measures in the countries they’ve gone to will result in an increase of at least 39,000 returnees this year and 120,000 next.27 June. This is, as far as I can ...”

“... the sort-of-autobiography Roland Barthes published in 1977, of ‘the ship Argo (luminous and white), each piece of which the Argonauts gradually replaced, so that they ended with an entirely new ship, without having to alter either its name or form’; except that Nelson’s Argo is not a ship or (as for Barthes) a workload, but a family unit, a home. A ...”

“... convertors for electrical frequency, and an editing machine authenticated as having belonged to Michael Winner. The atmosphere of the fabled movie-going years is summoned by a case of flea sprays and perfumed chemical drenches which struggle to cover the reek of weekly bathers in sodden gabardine. Portraits of the great and the good who have visited the ...”

“... plotting. They keep plotting, and this has been going on for so long and everybody knows it …’Michael Bloomberg After the former Republican New York mayor endorsed Clinton at the Democratic Convention (‘Let’s elect a sane, competent person’), Trump said: ‘I was gonna hit one guy in particular, a very little guy, I was gonna hit this guy so ...”

“... look at the scene of the accident.We are en route down the A65 for the funeral of a close friend, Michael Hindle, my solicitor. Almost at Skipton we are in a traffic jam. There has been a fatal accident, with an ambulance already here, a police car and what looks like a body bag. We wait, and as we wait a herd of cows in a field overlooking the road slowly ...”

“... of the fight still on him. The truest literary account of Vietnam is generally taken to be Michael Herr’s Dispatches – a work whose title declares it to be a direct communication from the front. The hitherto most-applauded novel of Vietnam, John Del Vecchio’s The Thirteenth Valley (1982), was written by a former member of the 101st Airborne ...”

“... all those tumbling, ambiguous green metaphors. Inundation, crushed lungs, steepling walls of white water, Frankenstein’s monster liberated from his Arctic prison, cities swallowed in the chilling rush. The fears were out. Weather as threat, like Larkin’s sexual intercourse, began with the Beatles. It was canonised from the pulpit by Gregory Bateson ...”

“... blame for Plath’s death. In this story, Plath arrives at Cambridge immaculate, with her gold and white Samsonite luggage, her neat Smith College clothes, her shiny freshly-washed blond hair. And England drags her under, dirties her, releases the true poetic self, which is ‘aggressive, rude ... disorderly, sexual’. In death she is ‘the little defeated ...”

“... one response to this dilemma, and is the response which the Oxford edition favours. But then, as Michael Warren argued in a 1977 article on ‘Repunctuation as Interpretation’, modern punctuation ‘has rhetorical implications, and its intrusion inevitably affects the phrasing and, especially for the actor, the intonation of the speech; the most innocent ...”

“... crude an indicator. British Social Attitudes breaks down responses by age, by sex, by the great white or blue-collar divide, by political or religious affiliation, but not by social class, colour or geographic setting. The State of the Nation is concerned with the gulf between rich and poor, but its main concern is where power and influence lie. It is ...”