“... because of the captive audience. Having had his right leg specially immobilised in a large white plaster cast (the immense trouble he will take to get an effect has been a trademark throughout his career), he would sit in a crowded railway carriage with the glaringly encased leg sticking out into the aisle until everyone on board was aware of nothing ...”

“... and by the end of the decade rare ‘class’ was being shown by such public-school amateurs as Peter May and David Sheppard. In 1949, such was the craze for sport, 90,000 people turned up to watch the FA Amateur Cup Final. As Anthony Bailey, who watched Portsmouth when they won the League Championship two years running, fondly remembers, ‘football shorts ...”

“... recalling, is what John Le Carré called his fictional spy headquarters.And then​ there was Peter Sichel, a German Jew from a family who had lost their wine business to the Nazis. He had escaped to Bordeaux and, after France fell, to the US via Spain. Aged nineteen, he enlisted in the army the day after Pearl Harbor. Two years later, his fluency in ...”

“... base. Progressive politics was increasingly a preoccupation of public sector workers, salaried white collar employees and new social movements. The challenge for the SPD was to integrate its disparate interests with what remained of its traditional base. Divisions in the SPD, as much as pressure from the opposition, put paid to Schmidt’s government in ...”

“... I knew that Swedish worker-directors went on courses paid for by their employers and run by the white-collar section of the trade-union federation. But I was unprepared for the first question put to me by the worker-director placed next to me on my introductory visit: ‘Is it true that the takeover of our company by your company will give us access to ...”

“... high standards of cleanliness and to keep a guardian close by, it would explain the habitual white dress and her sister’s conscientious protection. It would explain why she never married, even when she found a man whose love for her was as great as hers was for him. It would explain why this woman who never wore glasses sought ophthalmological ...”

“... of Europe’s leading banks for December 2006 is a chilling experience: there – in black and white, but entirely unnoticed in the last months of pre-crisis complacency – is the evidence of their fragility. At the end of 2006, the Royal Bank of Scotland had on its balance sheet assets worth in total £848 billion, the equivalent of 64 per cent of UK ...”

“... he says of Byron; and of Dickinson, no less winningly: ‘She was reclusive, tended to wear white clothing, which was thought odd, and scarcely left her bedroom in her later years.’ Such things strike a whimsical note, but usually Carey’s humour has a flintier edge. It is, for example, difficult to miss the disdain in a description of Stephen ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Glaukos, he held a competition to discover who could best describe a strange cow of many colours, white, red and black. ‘It’s like a mulberry,’ suggested Polyidus, showing a mastery of metaphor that clearly marked him out as the man to find Glaukos, which he duly did, having divined from an owl (genitive glaukos) perched on a wine-store and bothered by ...”

“... is bilge’ (the German quark, which has since made its way into English, literally means ‘soft white cheese’). But whatever the conditions in which she found herself – in Warsaw, she was one of 14 political prisoners crammed into a single cell – she never lost her fervour: her joy, as she put it, amid the horrors of the world. ‘My inner ...”

“... solicitors, philosophers or retired miners, or whether they are lesbians or gay, or black or white. The objection is to the idea of such power, not merely to the class or gender or race of those who would exercise it. It is the business of judges to uphold the law, not to subvert it for moral gain. We should not ask judges to be proxy revolutionaries ...”

“... was part-nationalised in 1975 – and several banks have been as good as nationalised this year. Peter Mandelson recently said that the £2.3 billion in loan guarantees he unlocked for the car industry were no ‘bail-out’, being intended to promote its ‘greening’, but this was just a fancy way of getting access to £1.3 billion from the European ...”

“... Terribly strange. Then finally of course it turned out he wasn’t H. Green at all. His name was Peter Wilson. I was quite put out. In 1960, when he sends the Kennedys a congratulatory telegram, he gets a reply from Jackie, ‘who said that at first they thought it was from Harry Truman until they realised a) Harry wasn’t in Switzerland and b) wouldn’t ...”

“... have appealed much to Leavis either, but they do offer graphic additional proof in support of Peter Ackroyd’s assertion in his 1984 biography of Eliot that ‘when he allowed his sexuality free access, when he was not struggling with his own demons, it was of a heterosexual kind’: When my tall girl sits astraddle on my lap, She with nothing on and I ...”