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“... The novel contains hideous and wholly convincing battle descriptions. We learn the effect of white phosphorus on the human body (the blood boils subcutaneously). Apparently there are problems in conducting a body count after a B-52 raid: many of the corpses are reduced to a mere stain and body parts find their ways to the tops of trees. It is, it ...”

“... legends about Irish saints fasting against God, including one about the chief of them all, St Patrick, which presents him as refusing to descend from his now-famous mountain, Croagh Patrick, until God had agreed to all his admirable demands on behalf of his beloved Irish converts. After that, one fasted for God, and ...”

“... Here, as in Saint-Pierre, Esternome set to work with an inspired bricolage of slave lore and white technology, until his lover (who knew that one can’t do without l’En-ville) left him for a lithe, snide musician. Rambling on to Marie-Sophie about that failed hillside project, the ‘Noutéka des mornes’ or ‘magic community of nous’, Esternome ...”

“... be reached by wells and ventilation shafts, but its main entrances are beneath the statue of the White Sphinx – symbolising humanity’s regression to animal status – and in the basement of the Palace of Green Porcelain, a vast ruined Science and Natural History Museum which the Time Traveller sees as a latterday South Kensington. The great Victorian ...”

“... who spoke no English in childhood and who cannot recall his first adolescent sight of Dover’s white cliffs without emotion. Elton is consequently more conscious than most of us of England’s strange neglect of its past. ‘In this country history is not very present.’ Not that he has written exclusively on English topics. Following in the steps of his ...”

“... with what Rory McEntegart has told us about the Articles’ gestation. What transmogrified a White Paper intended to accommodate the Lutherans into something like the opposite was that in August 1539 Cranmer was tied up in negotiations with the Germans at Lambeth while Henry was in thrall to Bishop Cuthbert Tunstal. Bernard calls the destruction of ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... be challenged by ‘a rebellion attempted for matters of weddings, christenings, churches, eating white bread’, the King took time to respond, then demanded unqualified submission, which, given the military situation, was, Hoyle tells us, ‘nonsense’. Henry VIII had complained that the Pilgrims’ articles were ‘dark, general and obscure’. The North ...”

“... from left to right, cavalry charging an infantry group comprising a soldier brandishing a spear, a white-bearded standard-bearer who is also shown biting the dust, and a third – the central and most prominent figure – clutching a missile one end of which disappears behind his nose-guard. Then come a horseman striking at the knee of a prostrate man who ...”

“... because ‘techniques of smooth relations are the bread and butter of the middle classes.’ Yet white-collar crime is far more serious in economic terms than lower-class crime. As early as 1895, A.R. Barrett showed that banks lost more from fraud and embezzlement than from robbery. Asked about the education of his sons, John D. Rockefeller said: ‘I cheat ...”

“... He created innovative posters and catalogues for exhibitions of the work of Donald Judd, Patrick Heron, Richard Long and David Hockney. When Hockney drew a portrait of Glazebrook, he chose to represent him with Hollis’s 1970 catalogue in his lap. Christopher Wilson’s excellent Richard Hollis Designs for the Whitechapel, the final book from Hyphen ...”

“... when this volume begins, Betjeman was feeling the anxiety of the ageing writer, well expressed by Patrick Kavanagh, a friend of his from wartime Dublin: Give us another poem, he said Or they will think your muse is dead; Another middle-aged departure Of Apollo from the trade of archer. In January 1960 Evelyn Waugh declared that he and Betjeman, along with ...”

“... that is the minimal entry qualification for being considered ‘great’. In a memorialaddress, Patrick Blackett likened Florey’s achievement to that of Jenner, Pasteur and Lister: but the public were so little aware of him that when Macfarlane first approached publishers with the notion of a biography, they wondered if he would not do better to write on ...”

“... to their conclusion. But really after the 1969 Hyde Park Free Concert (Mick’s rather desirable white frock and all those hypocritical butterflies for the newly dead unlamented Brian), Richards’s reiterative narrative of Stones songs, gigs and internal warfare in Life was all news to me, and not all of it riveting. I see that this makes me an unlikely ...”

“... work otherwise. No pain, no gain. Feel the burn. Actually, I’d rather not, and the blessed Patrick Wall, neuroscientist and pain doctor, wishes it to be known that pain is almost entirely useless and good for nothing but getting rid of. He cites cancer pain, with the impatience of one who is suffering it himself, as the apogee of pointlessness. Cancer ...”