“... Elizabeth, but to be merely interested in the later Gloriana, ‘her face caked in carmine and white lead ... an English Turandot’. But he had better sustain that interest, since this is only the first of two projected volumes on the subject, ‘the book of the Channel Four series’ (which must be preferred to a book of the movie Elizabeth, if there ...”

“... cordillera vibrates in the distance at the edge of the plain, a bucolic scene complete with the white spirits of whirling plastic bags and the spasmodic craziness of driven cattle. Black wisps of ash float down as the sugar plantations, the dominant force in the valley, owned by a tiny handful of whites, insist now on burning some of the crop before harvest ...”

“... such nonsense, nor, when confronted by Widdicombe’s at least equally simplistic demands, will William Hague. The fact that Labour has now loosed itself from its traditional moorings and restraints is visible, too, in the growing sleaze chronicled by Tom Bower. Although Bower has concentrated his efforts on Robert Maxwell and (the intimately ...”

“... Silchester village hall, and reading out, from a primitive autocue – a series of large sheets of white cardboard, the text handwritten on them in thick felt-tip pen – the story of the first Christmas, as my contemporaries performed what I spoke. The most thrilling scene for me had nothing to do with donkeys, inns, stables, babies, shepherds, angels or wise ...”

“... Winston Churchill. One may disapprove of spin, but there are limits. Balfour’s teacher at Eton, William Johnson, described him as ‘fearless, resolved and negligently great’. The sting is in the ‘negligently’; Johnson, author of the ‘Eton Boating Song’, was also the author of the famous and equally sharp judgment on Balfour’s great Liberal ...”

“... and 1974, however, he showed no drawings at all, having come to think, as he told his biographer William Feaver, that his compulsion for linear accuracy was a ‘limiting and limited vehicle’. ‘He seems to have distrusted his own facility as a draughtsman,’ Treves writes, ‘and feared the future it promised of book illustration and decoration, but ...”

“... touch. The British diplomatic records – pink telegrams from the Foreign Office to its outposts, white ones sent to London from missions abroad – are full of entertaining examples. John Russell’s 1967 dispatch from Brazil begins: ‘Like the surface of the moon Rio is short of water, covered in dust and pocked with deep holes.’ American diplomats wrote ...”

“... yellow, teal and peach abound in the area. But with its high-ceilinged tenement flats, it attracts white bohemian types too. Morag Ramsay, a French and Spanish teacher, ushered me into her kitchen. There was a poster from a Cuban movie about Che Guevara on her kitchen wall. ‘I bought it on a street in Havana,’ she said. Ramsay, who is 59, had voted SNP all ...”

“... population had changed, as rapid deindustrialisation and the decline of the docks decanted its white working class to Essex, leaving a poorer, more vulnerable and now disproportionally immigrant population to bear the costs of deprivation, crumbling services and the rise of the National Front. True, at the century’s end private development and university ...”

“... in the south-western borderlands runs deep into Arizona, and into the defensive imagination of a white majority who take it as a god-given affirmation of the integrity of their state, and of the United States itself. A magnificent and costly border wall – ‘the fence’, ‘the barrier’ – now runs in sections, like a work by Christo and Jeanne ...”

“... Russia (‘What a very Tourguéneffish effect the samovar gives!’ Theodore Colville exclaims in William Dean Howells’s Indian Summer, set in Florence). But he was most admired for the poignancy of his work. ‘Read Lisa [A Nest of Gentlefolk] if you want your heart really broken,’ Colville tells the young woman who asks: ‘What is ...”

“... vans. At that time, remembering pictures of jolly Wehrmacht soldiers wrenching down the red and white Polish border gates, I felt quite protective about frontiers. But then I read a Polish novel. An allegory contrived to lull the censor, it described a tiny sliver of land between Belgium and Germany which had been overlooked by the surveyors as they drew ...”

“... Bellos and Whiteside and Schwartz, Anthea Bell, Linda Coverdale, David Coward, Howard Curtis, William Hobson, Sian Reynolds, David Watson – but, or and, one of the remarkable features of the project is how consistent the tone is across the books. When you look at the range of tones and voices in the same publisher’s multi-translator edition of ...”

“... red veins with endless tiny tributaries that ran even up his forehead and were lost in his bushy white hair … I never came into contact with him but once, when he asked any young lady in the room to hold up her hand if she had been chased by a wild bull, and as nobody else did I held up mine (though of course I hadn’t). ‘Ah,’ he said, ‘I am afraid ...”