“... al-Qaida. ‘We cannot reverse this outcome by more use of military force in Iraq,’ Lt General William Odom, the former head of the National Security Agency, told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. ‘To try to do so would require siding with Sunni leaders and the Baathist insurgents against pro-Iranian Shia groups. The Baathist insurgents constitute ...”

“... a doomed love affair. The film is composed almost entirely of still images, a series of black and white photographs accompanied by a narrator’s voiceover. There are other sounds, too – a soft and indecipherable whispering, for example, during the sequence depicting the experiment – which give life to the frozen stills, pulling them into the immediacy of ...”

“... Carter’s potboiler Beautiful Wasps Having Sex, to studies such as Michael Rogin’s Blackface, White Noise: Jewish Immigrants in the Hollywood Melting Pot.) Hollywood is captive to its own mythological origins. Gabler’s An Empire of Their Own sees it as the Jewish invention of a ‘shadow America’, an idealised vision of assimilationist immigrants who ...”

“... and renewal in postwar Toronto. Such criticism represented everything that the briskly rationalist William Empson, who detested religiose aesthetics like those of Eliot, found most nauseating. It was enamoured of charts and diagrams, polarities and sub-divisions, with that odd combination of rigorous categories and occult contents which one associates with ...”

“... car parts: as Benchley points out at the novel’s outset, like some grotesque über-car the great white must perpetually keep moving. My sister then held up as evidence The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism, in which Marinetti, declaring in 1909 that ‘time and space died yesterday’, describes driving his car so fast that it spins out and overturns. She ...”

“... to stand, or rather crouch. Dodson is splendid in appearance as well as oratory, a prophetic white beard underlining his main argument, that Australia should try and emulate Mandela’s South Africa by setting up commissions to work out reconciliation – and, by implication, to revise the historical understanding that has travestied such ...”

“... view of ancient Greek religion as a rather staid, almost statuesque form of cult, with its flowing white robes and strumming lyres. Instead, she exposed beneath the surface a much more violent, ecstatic, even ‘primitive’ (as she saw it) religion, which – she claimed in Themis – was best understood through the lens of Durkheimian anthropology (as she ...”

“... in the grave when Todd made a bid to edit her poems and ride to literary notoriety on Emily’s white apron strings. So the story goes – or a version of it.Dickinson’s work first appeared in 1890 in a volume co-edited by Todd and Thomas Wentworth Higginson. Julie Dobrow’s After Emily attempts to rescue Todd’s reputation by offsetting her bad ...”

“... luminaries. In fact the picture is Victorian, painted in about 1845, but the artist – James William Doyle, an uncle of Arthur Conan Doyle – was known as a meticulous historian, and the figures are vividly and accurately presented, using known 18th-century likenesses. Dr Johnson is holding forth, with the professional eavesdropper Boswell at his ...”

“... her fifties to be smitten with Skipper, a gay man eighteen years her junior. A good-looking, rich white Bahamian, Richard Roberts strung her along, joining in her flirtatious games, then swiftly offloaded her. Her sister Hilary told her to ‘grow up’, in other words, to give up.Byrne convinced me that Pym loved and suffered. ‘Pouring out her heart’ in ...”

“... isn’t an uneccentric figure himself. He’s best known as the amateur historian of fiercely White Russian sympathies who was ordered to pay Lord Aldington £1.5 million in libel damages in 1989 after accusing him of war crimes for his involvement in repatriating troops to Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union after the Second World War. (The award was later ...”

“... Not Grow Old’ (1945), an airman sees row on row of angelic aeroplanes flying into ‘a bright white light, shining bright and without any colour’ in a story that gives a gritty top-dressing of Hemingway to a wartime visionary mode that anticipates Powell and Pressburger’s A Matter of Life and Death by a couple of years.Dahl’s injuries led to ...”

“... his addiction to dihydrocodeine, an analgesic of which he took more than one hundred pills a day. William Burroughs described it as similar to heroin, twice as strong as codeine, but with a wired coke-like edge, so the North American doctors felt obliged to cure Göring of his dependency before allowing him to stand before the court.The phrasing makes it seem ...”

“... German-Jewish boyhood. ‘My Jew-boy’, Nixon was later to call him – at least once on the White House tapes – and it’s clear that many of Kissinger’s traits were acquired early on in Fürth. His family was one of those which did not identify with the opposition in Bavaria, preferring to stress its patriotic character, its past loyalty to the ...”

“... narrow eye Black-bottomed whitewear out of nowhere fast You see the azure through the muscatel The white opacities we hear as thunder The fact that each is an iambic pentameter disturbs their individual impact by turning them, in this listing, into a sort of joke stanza such as people have often made up by bringing together totally unrelated lines. It also ...”