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“... Centre at Caversham is a treasure trove, but it’s also a labyrinth in which one expects to find white-haired historians still groping myopically along the endless shelves of files, doomed to uncover material so fascinating that all likelihood of ever finishing any work of scholarship has long since passed.If ever there was a historian to whom the phrase ...”

“... je sais d’elle (1967), was the film he entitled Nouvelle Vague (1990). Nouvelle Vague is what Kenneth Burke would call a scenic work, because its setting, its where and when, gives rise to its story and theme. Its setting is a Swiss lakeside country estate, a site of both pastoral beauty and propertied privilege, and out of the conflict between that ...”

“... to get away with his career in the Colonial Service, one of open opposition to the enrichment of white colonists by an exploitation of black subjects. Rumbled finally and called home, he retired to a small, exquisite Elizabethan house in Oxfordshire to write a blazing exposé of the relations between white capital and ...”

“... fashionable to do so, she looked bendable, bone and muscle fluid like a cat’s. A swathe of flax-white hair protruded from a twist of felt, and underneath was something not quite true. Exquisite bone hid under delicate faintly painted flesh, each tone subtly emphasising and leading up to the wide eyes, lighter than Scandinavian blue and deeper than Saxon ...”

“... ways. This is particularly true of Joseph Chamberlain. Second City is full of Brummies, like Kenneth Tynan or the members of Duran Duran, who successfully pretended they were from somewhere else, but Chamberlain remains far more identified with Birmingham than his native Camberwell. He was its mayor for just three years, between 1873 and 1876, and spent ...”

“... muscularity, street smarts and studliness that had found earlier voice in Mailer’s essay ‘The White Negro’ and his novel An American Dream, and in Norman Podhoretz’s stentorian confession ‘My Negro Problem – and Ours’. Sure, the liberal arts are swell, but what good is book-learning in a showdown against the mightily hung? In an interesting ...”

“... The few who didn’t – the usual crew of Betjeman, Waugh, Lancaster, a Mitford or two and even Kenneth Clark – were regarded as frivolous self-advertisers playing at perversity. What had been a far from straightforward face-off between propagandists for diverse forms of classicism and, on the other side, god’s own warrior-goths, was exhumed as a ...”

“... being made, adapted from a memoir he would never complete, to be called ‘The Return of the Thin White Duke’. This dubious pseudonymous character was first aired in an interview with Rolling Stone’s bumptious but canny young reporter Cameron Crowe; it soon became notorious. Crowe’s scene-setting picture of Bowie at home featured black candles and ...”

“... financial crisis which seems finally to have been solved by Lewis Golden, the accountant on the white horse who Wells sees as a figure as heroic as Carlyle in the annals of the Library. All the other large and small circulating and subscription libraries of the Victorian and Edwardian eras – Boot’s, Mudie’s and thousands of cornershop twopenny-loan ...”

“... iron birds looked disapproval With rusty invidious beaks Among the water-lillies A splash – white foam in the dark! And you lay sobbing then Upon my trembling intuitive arm. He felt the disapproval of the iron birds to be an important clue to the couple’s ‘immoral’ behaviour, and he knew from his experience on the Force that ‘people who go into ...”

“... poem in 1965, and through the good offices of his younger poet friend Gael Turnbull, he found the white-haired Peggy, now married and the mother of two grown daughters, near Wolverhampton in the West Midlands. Having not seen her in 50 years, Basil turned up with a copy of the poem, which is dedicated to her, and they began a second love affair. Sima, then in ...”

“... sexual undercurrent’ in MacLiammóir’s account of Welles’s physical impact (‘small white teeth, a buckling up of the eyes into two oblique slits, a perplexed knitting of the sparse darkly coloured brows, and a totally unexpected darting forth of a big pale tongue’) reappears in heterosexual, or nominally heterosexual, contexts. John ...”

“... to ensure that it isn’t only the rich who can vindicate their rights. The Attlee government’s white paper said that the system introduced under the 1949 Legal Aid and Advice Act was intended to ensure that ‘no one will be financially unable to prosecute a just and reasonable claim or defend a legal right.’ Unlike the National Health Service, founded ...”

“... land at Wardenclyffe on the northern shore of Long Island, and commissioned the architect Stanford White to build a laboratory like no other on earth. In the few years that Tesla occupied Wardenclyffe, it stood as a great work of science fiction, a counterpart of Wells’s time machine or Frankenstein’s laboratory which had, somehow, made it off the page. A ...”

“... powerboat racing career. He entered the 1963 Daily Express race in his top of the range boat The White Migrant and his schoolfriend, who was at Lord’s for the day, recalls the story unfolding in headlines in the Evening Standard. At lunchtime it was ‘Surprise Leader in Powerboat Race’; by close of play it was ‘Powerboat Sinks’. ‘Well,’ his ...”