“... the gnawing anxiety about his standing one has to remember that he began as the whitest of British white hopes. Being the youngest undergraduate at Oxford for centuries (though he did not stay the course) was less significant than creating the score for the Sitwellian Façade at 19. It would take several decades for this masterpiece to achieve its final form ...”

“... because this is the Brando we have mostly seen on screen since Apocalypse Now: in A Dry White Season (1989), for example, where he plays a South African lawyer with a heavy stylistic debt to Charles Laughton; in Don Juan DeMarco (1995), where he plays an amiable psychologist who gets to dance with Faye Dunaway; in The Score (2001), where he plays ...”

“... First, to describe the novel. The narrative follows a heroine who has woken in hospital (‘a white room’) lacking all long- and short-term memory. The amnesiac gimmick is common enough in SF and thriller fiction (Other People is subtitled ‘A Mystery Story’, though the blurb somewhat nervously qualifies the description with the term ...”

“... Kinglake just sat there, not understanding the dialogue. ‘I was only the death’s head and white sheet with which he scared the enemy,’ Kinglake smiles, ‘I think that I played this spectral part exceedingly well.’ Dthemetri advised Kinglake to kill a guide who led them to the wrong bank of the Jordan. ‘There was something fascinating in this ...”

“... question here. Why should Archer, normally so bumptious about his Struggle from Log Cabin to White House, miss out so much of the log-cabin experience? A clue may lie in the curriculum vitae which Archer submitted to Cobb in 1961, and was later obtained by Levy of the Mail to help him with his ‘background’ piece during Archer’s libel action (Daily ...”

“... Friedland and Hecht had a revealing conversation with Stan Cohen, who was formerly part of the white resistance to South Africa’s apartheid regime and now teaches at the Hebrew University’s law school. Cohen is relieved that Israel never developed a theory of racial supremacy, but sees many parallels between the two apartheid regimes and thinks that ...”

“... performed Eclairs sur l’ audelá.The most interesting of the single-work chapters is by Richard Steinitz on Des canyons aux étoiles, possibly because the author’s enthusiasm is tempered by doubts about the work’s total impact. ‘One has to accept,’ Steinitz says, ‘that the nature of his faith reduces the possibilities of dramatic ...”

“... degree of detail unprecedented for a composer since Cosima Wagner’s diaries gave us a quotidian Richard. Stravinsky may well have reckoned on this in forging the intimate relationship (‘dearest Bobsky’) with Craft but he cannot have known just how acute and gifted an observer he would prove, how naturally sensitive a Stravinskologist. In describing the ...”

“... in October, during what the Israeli Army called its ‘incursion’ – a euphemism inherited from Richard Nixon’s invasion of Cambodia – into towns under the nominal jurisdiction of the Palestinian Authority. Young men distributed dry sticks of olive wood to dip into a barrel of fire. In Arabic and English, ...”

“... swirl of colours: old gold, brown, magenta, blue. Beneath her grave lectorial face was a sharply white jabot, itself the centre of the picture around which the colours played. These were sombre: Redon was concentrating unfrivolously on his wife just as she was concentrating on her book. And then, suddenly, I saw where he had signed his homage: in tiny ...”

“... be a godfather to Private Eye, as satire and exultant disrespect returned to Britain in the 1960s. Richard Ingrams and Peter Cook – three decades younger – let him guest-edit a gorgeous special number on the Profumo scandal in 1963, in which, among other scoops, he drove Whitehall to apoplectic fury by printing the name of Sir Dick ...”

“... some pretty warm feelings, as Boswell knew: in 1762, Johnson allegedly told him that ‘the white bubbies and the silk stockings’ of actresses ‘excite my genitals’. It was only during the 19th century that the word sensible became permanently yoked to the practical, commonsensical part of human nature. Tetty, born in the 17th century, probably did ...”

“... tall, slender, with a mass of red hair – and began to dress as though she were one, in black and white, in sweeping, daring gowns. Seeing her in Dieppe, a regular holiday spot, Beerbohm reported that she ‘trails about, all day, in evening dress – low neck, no sleeves, and a train as long as the rue de l’Hôtel de Ville, which she carries over her ...”

“... to restore the rule of fathers everywhere; to undo the psychic castration suffered by straight white men at the hands of invading immigrants, feminist women, ‘woke’ mobs, DEI initiatives and the democratic presumption of equality.In fact, the unconscious never left the scene. Psychoanalysis tells us that it is the unconscious that sets the scene. What ...”