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“... shamelessly.What was this? It was more than fame and more than glamour. And it was a bit less than Edmund Burke’s fierce gallantry on glimpsing the figure of Marie Antoinette. Yet there was history in it, somehow. The images of Dallas, and of the exquisitely grave widow at the state funeral, are the shared televisual experience of a generation. They also ...”

“... give a fascinating picture of Poland – no, they are Poland, as Juan Rulfo is Mexico, or Patrick White Australia. Further, they contain some of the funniest, most outrageous, acid and lugubrious writing I have ever read. I don’t think I have ever been spoken to by an author the way I have by Konwicki. The first of these four books is The Polish Complex ...”

“... new historians, among them Segev and Naomi Shepherd, the Zionist project is part of the saga of white settlement, as in North America and Rhodesia. The settlers declared independence only when they no longer required the Mother Country’s soldiers to subdue the natives. Presenting Israelis as colonisers, rather than as enemies of imperialism, was once the ...”

“... grand and wealthy Margot Beste-Chetwynde. As it happens, her riches derive principally from the white slave trade, in which Pennyfeather becomes unwittingly implicated, and for which he uncomplainingly takes the rap. After some strings are pulled, however, he is released from prison and goes back to Oxford to pursue his theology degree. So anonymous a ...”

“... Christie was well put by one of the first grown-up critics to write about detective fiction, Edmund Wilson, in his 1945 essay-review, ‘Who Cares Who Killed Roger Ackroyd?’ Her writing is of a mawkishness and banality that seem to me literally impossible to read. You cannot read such a book, you run through it to see the problem worked out; and you ...”

“... Powers, there is a parody of a Betjeman poem. Thus kneeling at the altar rail We ate the word’s white papery wafer. Here, so I thought, desire must fail, My chastity be never safer. But then I saw your tongue protrude To catch the wisp of angel’s food. In a brilliant piece of word play the angel food cake of the children’s tea-party becomes the ...”

“... ice and to the meaning of exploration had built up since the mid-18th century, when the schoolboy Edmund Burke, watching the Liffey overflow its banks into the streets of Dublin, began to define the feelings it evoked as the Sublime: the terrible but inspiring otherness of nature out of control, the voice of this otherness calling to the soul and making men ...”

“... planned to send an envoy to judge his sanity. Restless and unwell, Daniell became preoccupied by White-nights, a ranch set up by a friend of Carpenter’s in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada in California. She had a ‘long-treasured’ project of founding a socialist colony, and they heard glowing reports about the ranch, built in a sheltered valley ...”

“... aid, refused even to make public the identity of its directors, and worked hard to keep new white settlers to a minimum. It was this last policy which in the end – though only in the 1860s – led to the withdrawal of the company’s charter. By that time its writ technically ran over a twelfth of the land surface of the globe, but these vast domains ...”

“... to this question, from long biographies by Graham Robb (2000) and Jean-Jacques Lefrère (2001) to Edmund White’s short but thought-filled account of ‘the double life of a rebel’ (2008). And there is no doubt, so far as I know, that a person called Arthur Rimbaud wrote the works and letters attributed to him. Or that he was born in 1854 in ...”

“... in her. Things changed in the 20th century. Indeed, the modern age has overturned the assertion of White Kennet, an early 18th-century bishop of Peterborough, that ‘Qu. Elizabeth had a Camden, and King Charles a Clarendon, but poor James I has had I think none but paltry scribblers.’ The rise of the historical novel and the popular biography has produced a ...”

“... the rejected; the meaty, the monstrous, the mathematical. (See also Renaud Camus’s Tricks, or Edmund White’s States of Desire: to the company of Byron’s ‘Princess of Parallelograms’ we should add the type of the counting-house trickster, the stud-libertine for whom quantity is quality.) I approach the corpus of Mapplethorpe, and the life ...”

“... and artists it included than for those it didn’t (Hemingway, Dewey, Mencken, Salinger, Thurber, Edmund Wilson, Nabokov) and for those who, having joined, resigned (Thomas Hart Benton, Lewis Mumford, John O’Hara, Yvor Winters, Ezra Pound). Nor was it famous for anything it actually did: for years its main business was merely to perpetuate itself by ...”

“... these days. A candidate who lacks basic qualifications (and hence could not present himself in a white toga) is a ‘nigrate’. The Maltese censors who finally allow Toomey his copy of Thomas Campion’s poems confuse the poet with the English martyr Edmund Campion. (Some autobiography there, I ...”

“... Andrew Sullivan, ‘azza’ declarations – ‘as a colleague of David Simpson’; ‘as a white, middle-class male’ – in the age of identity politics. ‘Agonise’ is the right word here: every page of his book radiates anger, frustration and impotence at a situation in which the obsession with situation is itself the problem. For underlying the ...”