“... drink the urine of reindeer that had browsed on the mushroom. Our own Father Christmas – red and white like amanita, and borne aloft by tipsy reindeer – may be a tortuous folk-memory of this cult. According to the philologist John Allegro, if I remember his drift correctly, Jesus Christ was also a mushroom. More recently, the witches of Medieval Europe ...”

“... the sky in Bulatov’s large canvases (‘Glory to the CPSU!’), or the rows upon rows of white rectangles that comprise Komar and Melamid’s ‘Quotation’, where we don’t even need to see the words to recognise a deadened formula. Sorokin’s early texts were displayed at Conceptualist exhibitions and circulated among friends in the form of ...”

“... couldn’t help but look after the weak. Well, not much wrong with such a notion in the black and white, troubled world of the 1940s and 1950s (or even the present one, just for a bit of a rest). After the war, in books but most of all in old movies, these reluctant action heroes became perfect modern exemplars for the likes of Camus, who saw in them a stoic ...”

“... don’t like feeling that they are being teased. When Shostakovich repeatedly quotes Rossini’s William Tell Overture in the first movement of the Fifteenth Symphony, is this to be understood as a motif for freedom, as some commentators have speculated? A hint that Shostakovich, like Rossini, had ‘lived slightly too long’, as he suggested in a letter to ...”

“... then governing the slave refuge colony of Sierra Leone, Zachary, like his fellow abolitionist William Wilberforce, believed the spread of the Gospel was a much greater cause. Blacks should be free to serve their – that is, his – God, and to take their proper places in the hierarchy of humanity that the evangelicals saw as ‘natural’, and essential ...”

“... wasn’t unprecedented: Lincoln presented the arguments of the Whig presidential candidate William Henry Harrison in the 1836 presidential campaign.) In a 1948 primary campaign, Harold Stassen and Thomas Dewey debated the outlawing of the American Communist Party on national radio. The idea of a televised presidential debate was proposed in 1959 by ...”

“... cases no one else would touch in the face of harassment and death threats from his fellow white Topekans. Post-Gage Park, when the Phelpses became America’s ‘most hated family’, there were accusations that he had only been doing it for the money, but his work was publicly recognised and acclaimed by the NAACP.Megan reports all this but seems at ...”

“... are given his opinion on hanging group shows (go alphabetical), the painting of gasometers (choose white), and the droit de suite legislative proposals of 1930 (he’s against).Sickert’s commentaries are not simply pungently phrased; many of them retain their power to bite. His own technical experience and the relative cohesiveness of the era’s critical ...”

“... if helpfully complaisant, philanderer. Among other men she was attracted to, the novelist William Gerhardie proved to have sadistic tendencies which she didn’t enjoy, while the theatre and film director Tony Richardson was so nervous of her that when lodging with the Smiths in St John’s Wood he hardly dared to take a bath. Manning’s generally ...”

“... or diplomatically, so instead attempted to undermine the spiritual foundation of Islam. A white man with a Western name wouldn’t be able to get the job done – better to use an Indian Muslim to pit Muslims against one another. According to Mohajerani, Rushdie received a handsome advance and in return was tasked with showing that the Prophet ...”

“... Two years​ after the end of the Civil War, William Seward, the US secretary of state, negotiated the purchase of ‘Russian America’ – Alaska – for $7.2 million, equivalent to $165 million today. The New York Times noted that the acquisitionincludes the strip four hundred miles long, which extends down the coast, thus excluding a large part of British America from the ocean … more than doubles the United States coast on the Pacific … includes a great number of islands, and is of the highest importance as a naval depot and for strategic purposes ...”

“... an Ethiopian conscript, its fingernails perfectly preserved, gropes at the sky from a forearm of white bone obscured at the elbow by khaki rags and tall, thin grass. This, and other evidence of fighting at close quarters, is dispassionately surveyed by columns of young fighters, dressed in tattered clothing and packing the standard Kalashnikov. Mid-morning ...”

“... can see why Rubens might have been jealous. The old man’s skin, his slightly rheumy eye and the white hair of his beard are wonderfully realised. Rubens tends to make use of a repertoire of effective conventions (the marks for an eyelid, folds in the skin, cheeks and so on) and unites them in a springy dance of brushstrokes. Van Dyck observes finer ...”

“... what happened at Guernica to ‘Red hordes’, and as late as the 1970s a contributor to William Buckley’s National Review was still making the accusation.) Pointing the finger at Red militiamen also neatly avoided the question of German involvement. Steer had plenty of first-hand evidence of the Condor Legion’s presence in Spain: he had himself ...”

“... his is more of a social analysis than Sheppard’s, as regards present-day London at least. If William Morris found Londoners a century ago ‘joyless, hopeless, shameless, angerless, set in their stare’, Hebbert now finds the opposite, and can back his sentiment with statistics. Illuminating on sport (East London has 37 golf courses against West ...”