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“... Brassaï to take in 1939 show him in a well-lit studio wearing what looks like a doctor’s white coat, sitting close to Wilma Javor, the young woman he is drawing. Clothed old men drawing naked young women are one of Picasso’s subjects, even though Picasso didn’t spend much time working that way; Matisse did. You could guess this – and also ...”

“... with one leg pointing downwards to the sea and the other playfully curled beneath her in her white playsuit. Her arms behind her back were keeping her upright, exposing her breasts. Douglas Fairbanks was looking towards her appreciatively. The photo said no more than that a famous man looked at her, as if she were a mirror in which to check he still had ...”

“... the way water seemed to me when I was young and still seems now: sustaining, brown, benign – or white, decisive, invigorating, rushing over a weir, churning from the back of a boat. Having been adopted, I was spared the binding notion of blood, with all its passion and fatalism. I simply took the platitude and stood it on its head. I am no longer sure what ...”

“... by the former Conservative Party chairman Ben Elliot. Starmer’s former chief of staff, Sam White, went to Flint Global, where his boss is James Purnell, who served as a minister under Gordon Brown. Flint claims to offer its clients – which include Meta, Amazon and Uber – ‘unparalleled insight into how Labour thinks and works’. The former home ...”

“... Lyndon Johnson and not Kennedy, Ford and not Nixon, or even that there was nobody in the White House at all – as under Reagan. In short, a strong economy and great power can be politically almost foolproof, just as, conversely, there are limits to what pure talent and leadership can achieve, as every military historian knows. Rommel was beaten by ...”

“... he would win easily. This interview was conducted in French, in Pretoria, on 20 July 2006. Peter Hallward: Haiti is a profoundly divided country, and you have always been a profoundly divisive figure. For most of the 1990s many sympathetic observers found it easy to make sense of this division more or less along class lines: you were demonised by the ...”

“... are all large (eight to ten feet). In No. 16 the orange-red strip is sandwiched between a narrower white strip and a deep white rectangle. The fuzzy edges of the deep rectangle project beyond a hard edge – the effect is of a piece of white fabric which has been frayed to left and ...”

“... an acute awareness of the politics of his own authority as a novelist and, above all, as a white South African novelist. It is difficult not to read the opening of his 1992 essay on Erasmus’s The Praise of Folly without recalling the terms in which Gordimer framed her charge: To the extent that [Erasmus] became involved in the rivalry between the ...”

“... announces, a little proudly: Only to dance together in triumph of being together Two white ones, sharp, vindicated, Shining and touching, Is heaven of our own, sheer with repudiation. In this triumphal dance the partners seem to be at daggers drawn, each blade sharpened by the repudiation of everything past, and, one suspects, of much in each ...”

“... of the maternity ward in which almost all of our babies first get fed. But colostrum was not white; it did not look like, smell like, taste like, mother’s milk. Custom, and medical lore, decreed therefore that a mother should not breastfeed her child till colostrum ceased to flow and was replaced by milk as milk should be. In its first few hours and ...”

“... that it is a work of craft to be admired in its own right. The pictures sit in the midst of wide white margins. The sober immobility of the people confirms what the fine detail of grass, stone and flesh had already announced: that the camera they stood before was a stolid thing-certainly no portable extension of a moving eye. The portraits are often taken ...”

“... Dryasdust has had his day and good riddance. Don’t be deceived by the slick subtitles, however. Peter Lake knows more than anyone else about the religious culture of the secondary and tertiary stages of the English Reformation. This is not only a book of dazzling brilliance and acute intelligence, it has many important things to say about the ...”

“... Peter Lessing​ died in his flat, of a heart attack, in the early hours of 13 October 2013, aged 66. His mother, Doris Lessing, died four weeks later, on 17 November 2013, aged 94, in the adjoining house. An interconnecting door had been cut into the shared wall and was always left open. This very nearly tells the story of their lives as mother and son, in the sense that we know our planet is part of our universe, but there remain gaping holes of incomprehension that no one is going to be able to fill no matter how much detail their story is told in ...”

“... Christ calming the four winds of heaven. Webe Hayla Maryam in procession. The crucifixion of St Peter; the beheadings of St Paul and St Matthew; the garrotting of St Mark. St Matthias being burned; the recognition of Gabra Krestos. The first council of Nicaea, with Arius squatting.PreviousNext Each wall of the maqdas measures about six metres by six ...”

“... to take over the Russian near-abroad, or Swedes who want to avenge their defeat at the hands of Peter the Great (that pearl came from Kiselev). It’s hard to find anyone who takes this stuff literally, but it helps to create a climate in which conspiracy becomes the norm. The Ukrainian crisis has also triggered other, far less savoury associations. At one ...”