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“... Western canon of literary classics is necessarily an instrument of the ‘cultural racism’ of ‘white males’. Nor does he have much patience with the idea that this canon is made up of ‘static monuments’ supportive of ‘political oppression’ and ‘totalising’ in their psycho-social effects. He points out that canons – even religious ones ...”

“... In publishing his compendious work Metahistory in 1973, Hayden White gave currency both to a term and to a programme. His subtitle, ‘The Historical Imagination in 19th-Century Europe’, indicated the broad area of his investigations, but gave little sense of the radical originality of this programme, which was quite simply the re-examination of historiography in its written form ...”

“... rage for the Annales School; and finally of US-centred literary theory. ‘Tropologists’ such as Hayden White and, latterly, Frank Ankersmit made their own attempt to fill the vacuum by suggesting that, since there was apparently no other structural principle to hand, the kernel of historical writing must be found in its exemplification of ...”

“... cared when Jacques Derrida questioned the epistemological foundations of historical knowledge, or Hayden White insisted that historical narratives are, in large measure, carefully contrived myths. But when Indians spoiled the quincentenary of 1492 by condemning Christopher Columbus as a mass murderer, not only did the popular press cry ‘foul’, but ...”

“... analysis but also, in a sense, its impending crisis. From 1970 onwards, the gulf between what Hayden White has called the ‘Absurdist’ and the ‘Normal’ tendencies in French criticism was to grow ever more considerable, with Barthes himself as the only token of what they had once held in common. Genette, co-editor with Todorov of the excellent ...”

“... history as a form of philosophical discourse but from the idea (best exemplified in the work of Hayden White) that as a story, or something contrived, history is not all that different from stories which make no claim to ‘truth’. ‘Dear reader,’ he wrote in a typically self-conscious style (and here I paraphrase), the story I am about to tell ...”

“... all sides to be an absolutely incomprehensible book, Ecrits. To read Dan Sperber on Lévi-Strauss, Hayden White on Foucault, or Malcolm Bowie on Lacan, is to realise that the terrain, until recently so inhospitable, has been expertly mapped, the rough places made plain, and pleasant bowers and seats arranged for the ascending traveller at just the ...”

“... reconstructed. At this point, it is appropriate to enlist History in the debate, and to introduce Hayden White, whose scandal for orthodox historians consisted in his denial of the historical fact as such and his insistence on the primacy of historical ‘emplotment’ (his term, borrowed later on by Ricoeur). History is then also a text, and we are its ...”

“... sunny clearings in the midst of impenetrable gloom. Before his humble ghost alerts the men in white coats, however, perhaps I should move on. One of Wilamowitz’s criticisms was that Burckhardt was at least fifty years out of date, and fifty years later Arnaldo Momigliano was still blaming him for breathing new life into the already elderly notion of ...”

“... He strongly suggests that Foucault, too, is one of them. He hesitates about including my colleague Hayden White, who is on most lists of Postmodernist bad guys: Williams treats White’s Metahistory with respectful caution. He does not mention Derrida by name, but would probably count him as a denier, for he brackets ...”

“... a step that could have led to disciplinary measures. The final decision on this fell to Michael Hayden, the CIA director at the time. He chose not to. ‘It was a pretty easy call,’ he writes in Playing to the Edge, his new memoir. He doesn’t describe el-Masri as ‘innocent’, noting his ‘clouded past’, but does admit he was a ‘false ...”

“... trial brought an opportunity to confront the reality of smuggling, few seemed to care. Sally Hayden, an Irish freelance journalist who reported on the trial, was shocked to discover that she and her Ethiopian translator were the only independent observers in the courtroom. ‘When two of the most significant smugglers in North Africa were ...”

“... Every year on 8 May, a young woman dressed in armour and carrying a white banner rides in procession through the streets of Orléans in north-central France. Dignitaries of Church and State join in commemorating an event and a life. The event is the French relief of the city, after months of siege by the English, in 1429; the life is that of Joan of Arc, a 17-year-old girl from Lorraine told by heavenly voices to go ‘into France’ and to rescue Orléans ...”

“... countries like Britain which have effective health systems. In London, most syphilis sufferers are white HIV-positive males between the ages of 25 and 44 who have attended sex-on-premises bars; in the jargon of the GUM (genito-urinary medicine) clinic, a majority are MSM – men who have sex with men. So, although syphilis is a shadow of its former self, it ...”

“... remarked drily that the election could have been won by a drover’s dog. Another colleague, Bill Hayden, said it could have been won by a cripple. Hayden, now Australia’s Foreign Minister, had reasons to be less than wholly delighted by Hawke’s triumph. Until the very day that the election was called, ...”