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“... individuals’. In fact, it was a speculation. Some of the houses stood empty for years, but W.S. Gilbert was true to his promise that he would move there in October 1883 ‘in whatever condition the premises may be’. One party of casual passers-by, seeing workmen and open doors, took a look inside and were surprised to find ...”

“... their philosophical outlook. An instance of the first fallacy is provided by Chapter Three of Alan Gilbert’s book, titled ‘Chartism and Marx’s Second Revolutionary Strategy’, yet almost exclusively concerned with Engels. The history of the second fallacy is traced by Jacoby, with particular emphasis on the little-known Italian opposition to Engels ...”

“... Sylvester explains that he became interested in art when, at 17, he was fascinated by a black and white reproduction of a Matisse. He at once began to paint in oils, but soon discovered that he lacked talent and began to write about art instead, devoting himself thenceforth to the black and white of the page. A left-wing ...”

“... T. Washington and to attend a black people’s congress in Chicago. He then offended some of his white hosts by calling for a mingling of the races and an end to segregation. More than thirty years later his commitment to removing social and racial inequalities was underlined by his membership of the Sankey Committee on Human Rights and by his 1940 Penguin ...”

“... culture. Or perhaps they are a red-state art form: patriotic, sentimental, hopelessly unhip and white, full of small-town values, at home in suburban high schools. Unlike jazz and film, which gained respectability as pop and TV supplanted their popularity, the musical holds its own lonely place in culture; it doesn’t quite belong to anyone. Raymond Knapp ...”

“... has been particularly grumpy in her gearshift ever since it went on.I resent it myself. As a white Australian who rather likes living here, I am the beneficiary of an invasion. If honour is due to Captain Phillip, a brave leader with amazing management skills, more is due to the convicts, who fetched, carried and built on the fatal shore, often in ...”

“... John White is famous for the drawings he made in the late 1580s which record aspects of the North American littoral: its geography, its inhabitants, their dress, customs and dwellings, and the birds, plants and animals found there. Seventy-five of White’s drawings, along with navigational instruments, maps, books and relics of 16th-century exploration are on show in A New World, an exhibition at the British Museum until 17 June ...”

“... The fake Spanish dancer Lola Montez, née Eliza Gilbert, had one of those lives which make us aware of unlikely simultaneities. Operetta clanked against Western as she toured the gold-towns of the American West and Australia with a skit called ‘Lola Montez in Bavaria’. It was a farcical whitewash of her most infamous hour, when as a fake countess she had rocked an Ancien Règime court in the Year of Revolutions ...”

“... than there are men – a fact the Tate curators acknowledge, along with the infrequency of non-white faces: ‘We have been constantly frustrated by the comparative scarcity of material.’ In a section somewhat dutifully titled ‘Defying Convention’, we find John Singer Sargent’s 1881 portrait of an austerely boyish Vernon Lee, and Alvaro Guevara’s ...”

“... on for many of us, as for Trollope, ‘a terrible aspect’. It doesn’t apparently, though, for Gilbert Phelps, John Sutherland and Peter Keating, surveyors and encyclopedists of the form who in their respective fields have laboured with energetic exhaustiveness and not broken down. Each of these books feels as if it takes in an infinity of novels, and each ...”

“... Gilbert Adair the critic writes with feeling and practised bitterness about the anxiety of influence – ‘that looming, lowering pressure exerted, wilfully or not, by those who have already “made it” on those who have not, a pressure cramping, crushing and on occasion castrating the creative energies of the rising generation ...”

“... lot, eager to betray the selfish motives behind their altruism. Like the repulsive, manipulative Gilbert Fairchild, the hero of Ms Martin’s cynical little novel, they know that what you wear, not who your ancestors were (his grandfather Max came from Lithuania) marks your position in society, and that saying or doing the Right Thing at the Right Time may ...”

“... and to their diaspora, as well as to at least five wars, with more, probably, to come. Martin Gilbert quotes a remark by Curzon, the British Foreign Secretary in 1920, which well conveys the frivolous irresponsibility of Balfour and Lloyd George. ‘The Prime Minister clings to Palestine for its sentimental and traditional value, and talks about Jerusalem ...”

“... to try to utter.’ No woman would assent to that last sentence unless she wanted to end up a white goddess, or an ordinary white elephant. (The Kings of Siam used to give a white elephant to hated courtiers, who would then promptly ruin themselves on its costly maintenance.) Yet John ...”

“... Archer, is pursued by three suitors: the dashing, reliable Lord Warburton; the dashing, demonic Gilbert Osmond; and a relentless, even fanatical American industrialist who is called not Boldwood, but Caspar Goodwood. James accused Hardy of having ‘little sense of proportion and almost none of composition’, but it can be hard, at first, to divine much ...”