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“... In Berkeley, he took classes with the historian Ernst Kantorowicz, became friends with the poets Kenneth Rexroth and Robin Blaser, and formed an intense alliance with Jack Spicer that set the stage for the San Francisco Renaissance and later curdled into an open and often hostile rivalry. During one energetic six-month period he met or made contact with ...”

“... team regularly plays, and plays very traditionally with no lurid lycra kit but in immaculate white flannels and caps. The players seem to be largely taxi drivers, their cabs parked on the road or, as today, by the actual field. With no interest in cricket we’re both of us cheered by this old-fashioned spectacle and the players who go to the trouble to ...”

“... Memorial Theatre at Stratford-on-Avon was closed. But around 11 a.m. a girl called Eileen White noticed ‘an awful lot of smoke’ pouring from the back of the building. When she told her aunt she was reassured that it was only ‘Mr Gisbourne’s bonfire’. An hour later, the theatre manageress, Alice Rainbow, was finally warned that the building ...”

“... back to see the original. Portions of it, particularly the bits of opus sectile in black and white, I’d like to grub up and frame, but some of it seems crude and the colours vulgar and I’ve no means of knowing whether the parts I like are the original stones and the vulgar bits Victorian renovation or the other way round. Certainly the much later ...”

“... to sweep the ‘dead wood’ from the boardrooms and subject venerable institutions to the ‘white heat’ of modern technology, history carried the stigma of being old-fashioned, and there was a concerted attempt to abandon earlier periods and drag the subject kicking and screaming into the 20th century. As J.H. Plumb, that weathervane of the liberal ...”

“... the corner of the room. So Plimpton fills 31 pages with talk of the night of Truman’s Black and White Ball, but only 24 pages with his entire childhood. (This is a less happy Boswellian trait.) The party method favours the party-goers, and you’d be better off in the company of Gerald Clarke’s biography, published ten years ago, if you wanted to know ...”

“... a longing for Scurry of satyr-hooves in dewy lands, Pan-pipes at noon, the lust, the shaggy fur, White blossoms and swift Dionysiac mirth.It wasn’t very good, but Hilda liked its author. By the end of the month they had moved in together, or at least lived in separate rooms in the same house, 6 Church Walk in Kensington. They were still seeing a good deal ...”

“... that in colleges at Oxford and Cambridge or on the top floors of country houses. But scrubbed and white-painted as these quarters may have been, cramped they certainly were and often situated behind and adjacent to the state rooms and grand corridors where the ceremonial life of the court was led. Access to these back parts is through doors flush with the ...”

“... at the Dorchester. ‘I quite liked him being the waiter; he was rather a good waiter. Dressed in white he was OK.’ Some years later, in France (‘I may have a sadistic streak, I think’), he encouraged Clement to take a ride on a helter-skelter: ‘I was down below watching him go round, roaring with laughter at his fear and anger; he couldn’t get off ...”

“... talked loudly, pulled faces and made jokes. After they were convicted, the judge, Mr Justice Kenneth Jones, who sentenced them to be detained during Her Majesty’s Pleasure, wrote to the Home Secretary that ‘neither displayed any real remorse. Their evidence was obviously untruthful. I have no doubt that they both attacked the deceased ... their ...”

“... the performers were ready to shove and push to make sure of a good position on the stage: ‘young White, son of the keeper of the county gaol … & a pretty good player … being willing to secure the uppermost place for himself, jostled me against the door at the end of the orchestra where I had but little enjoyment of the concert.’ In his wonderfully ...”

“... stands like a lonely beacon on the North Sea: Isolate city spread alongside water, Posted with white towers, she keeps her face Half-turned to Europe, lonely northern daughter, Holding through centuries her separate place. Although Hull’s first poet is perhaps the most celebrated political poet in English, it seems as hard for posterity to place him as ...”

“... reveals herself as plump and well-fed, possibly pregnant. She hangs around for a bit, shoving her white nose through the trellis on top of the wall before disappearing next door. Meanwhile the wreath-laying has started, which I’m always impressed by. In the unlikely event of my being asked to lay a wreath at the Cenotaph I’d have to decline, if only ...”

“... a series made for BBC2 in collaboration with Mike Dibb and others, and intended as a riposte to Kenneth Clarke’s Civilisation.In many ways the BBC series was directly inspired by Benjamin’s essay, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, particularly in its emphasis on photography as the upstart young rival of painting, the product ...”

“... the floor of a Dominican church. Among the gravestones was a particularly striking one in grey-white marble with pink and blue veins. Two helmets with slits for eyes faced each other, like a pair of beaky dolphins about, clangingly, to kiss: ‘Tomb Slab of an English Couple’, the label in Istanbul’s Archaeological Museum says. The couple were ...”