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“... make a crash landing in the jungle and crawl out of the wreckage in their Abercrombie and Fitch white safari blouses and tan gabardine jodhpurs and stagger into a clearing. They are surrounded by savages with bones through their noses – who immediately bow down and prostrate themselves and commence a strange moaning chant.    The ...”

“... solid biographies of Eisenhower in two volumes (1983-84) and Nixon in three (1987-91). And though William McFeely won a Pulitzer Prize for his Grant (1981), that did not deter Jean Edward Smith from publishing a massive new Grant (2001), which some politicians have been reading with furtive pleasure because it finds that Gilded Age Administration less corrupt ...”

“... Decent people, Teresa Carpenter would assert, aren’t always what they seem. In 1982 William Douglas was working as a cell biologist at Tufts University near Boston, Massachusetts. He was an associate professor on the tenure track, a gifted scientist, and a successful grant-getter. He was married and he lived a quiet suburban life just outside the city with his wife and three children ...”

“... William Fiennes has a deep-seated sense of home and what it means to be distant from it. Birth-house, parents, migrant birds: these fuse in his passage on swifts, for example, which ‘come back each year, in the last week of May’ to his old home somewhere in the south country – a fact which interested me, because I have recorded their arrival since the 1950s in Aberdeen on 11 May and in Cumbria on 6 May ...”

“... here – bedtime, death and marriage – is very impressive, however awful the verse is, and William Empson has a wonderful aside on this subject: ‘I remember believing I should have to die in order to grow up, and thinking the prospect very disagreeable.’ In Burton’s movie the blue hookah-smoking caterpillar grows up in this sense, and reappears ...”

“... and the same holds true for the portraits. Flickers of colour only half follow the folds of the white uniform in The Little Pastry Cook (c.1922-23), which otherwise pursue their own painterly logic; seen in close-up they could easily have been made a few decades later, and it is no surprise to learn that New York School painters such as ...”

“... on the lake is destroyed by the electric light on the shore. Kabuki theatre becomes crude when white faces and gaudy costumes are flooded with light. The force of Tanizaki’s elegy for the old is made the more powerful by his perception that the new is unavoidable: he describes the problems he had building a new house, how convenience and a modern taste ...”

“... for a boy to come in to the hall after supper with his face blackened, his forehead bound with white or yellow taffeta, and bells tied to his legs. He then proceeded to dance the Morisco the length of the hall, forth and back, to the great amusement of the company ... The Morris, then ... danced by armed men to represent a conflict between Moors and ...”

“... Du Bois’s analysis, he would have been as much a pillar of the sociological canon as the three white European godfathers – they are confident, for example, that The Philadelphia Negro (1899) deserved the acclaim lavished on the Chicago School of the 1920s for pioneering the use of urban ethnography.Historical​ sociologists and Marxists might bristle at ...”

“... post-feudal Indian middle class and members of the British scholarly and administrative classes. William Jones, whose researches at the Fort William College in Calcutta were largely responsible for inaugurating Orientalist scholarship and the reconstruction of Indian history, wore native clothes made of muslin in the heat ...”

“... hunter who is planning an expedition to China to track down ‘a special kind of black and white bear’. Hamilton takes an immediate fancy to Edmund. ‘You remind me of Chingachgook’ he announces, not altogether plausibly. (Edmund comments, even less plausibly: ‘Chingachgook, the Last of the Mohicans, is actually pronounced Chicago by those in ...”

“... few days after James Schuyler had been admitted to Bloomingdale Hospital, a mental institution in White Plains, New York. Schuyler still gets his semi-colons right, and his appetite for gossip is undiminished: ‘Is it still Connecticut, the dear deer, the steady lay, the unprivate walls?’ His correspondent, John Hohnsbeen, an art-dealer friend, was having ...”

“... before the American Revolution and a leading member of the Clapham Sect (other members included William Wilberforce and Thomas Clarkson, who orchestrated the British campaign against the slave trade). Sharp was a bundle of energy and full of contradictions. He pestered the powerful to address the difficulties facing London’s black population, but also ...”

“... Soon afterwards, a John Buchan Society was founded at Edinburgh. In the early Eighties, my father William Buchan felt emboldened to publish a memoir of his father. Though a little defensive, it drew in the Victorian background and introduced a powerful sense of John Buchan’s strangeness and otherworldliness that had been missing from the ...”

“... one summer morning he and a friend found a Surrey golf course, where they played all 18 holes in white tie, tails and patent leather shoes. They were never able afterwards to identify which course it had been. Detailed to cover Edward VIII’s exit from the country after the Abdication, he attended a dance in Folkestone in ...”