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“... blasts that shook the building. Jennings came back on to announce a briefing by Larry Speakes, the White House press spokesman; back to Tripoli for the end of the raid (it was now 7:10 or so), a couple of commercials, and then down to Speakes in Washington. He read a prepared statement with his customary virtuosity, stumbling over nearly every syllable and yet ...”

“... details about the national struggle against rule from London. But the fact that the majority of white troops in British India were for a long time Irish, as were a fair number of the Empire’s administrators, adventurers and traders, is usually – and wrongly – left out of the story. The Scottish response to lost Empire, too, is often a calculated ...”

“... a conservative aesthetic, but in their later poems, they caught up with the American Modernists (William Carlos Williams describing the peeling cityscape outside his window): by the time she wrote ‘Requiem’ and he wrote ‘Lines on an Unknown Soldier’, both formally innovative and both concerned with recording the voices of the lost, they had been ...”

“... enough pulling a face. Cezanne’s private puzzling – just how should masses of lemon and lead white converse? – slips into provocative teasing. No, that plate on the right could hardly have perched in that way on a three-dimensional kitchen table, and yes, the fruit on it perform a balancing act that seems outright miraculous. But painters have always ...”

“... class distinctions into those of race. In India he sees the social aloofness of the ruling white minority as being reinforced during the 19th century by a growing taboo against sexual intercourse across the colour line. Half a century ago, Percival Spear, in his delightful book The Nabobs, traced the transformation from the 18th-century ménage of the ...”

“... and shore up its authority in its own sphere of influence, while at home they would allow the White House to outflank the antiwar left. As Kissinger put it, ‘refusing to negotiate with the Kremlin would spread the virulence of the anti-Vietnam protest movement into every aspect of American foreign policy, and deeply, perhaps, into our ...”

“... plagiarist (his speeches stole from Neil Kinnock and JFK). Age took the edge off him. Reaching the White House four years ago, he accomplished at 78 what he couldn’t manage at 45 or 65. Perhaps he’s been better at the job as a mellow old man than he would have been as a middle-aged hothead – though that is little comfort to the rest of the ...”

“... in his own evidence. The idea of the Civil War as a cultural conflict is not new: it goes back to William Chillingworth, preaching before the King in 1643, and saying all the scribes and pharisees were on one side, and all the publicans and sinners on the other. What is new here is the meticulous investigation, town by town and village by village, of the ...”

“... workers. These groups were most successful when they were well-organised, well-connected and white: all characteristics of the tobacco growers who benefited most from New Deal agricultural policy.The Agricultural Adjustment Administration gave farmers government subsidies to keep acreage fallow, protecting farm prices by creating scarcity. This policy ...”

“... ought there to be a glossary, ‘ee by gum’ or ‘eeh baah gum’? (The issues are raised by William Neill when he prints two versions of the same poem on facing pages, both in dialect but one a good deal more dialectal than the other.) Since poets are not etymologists they may play fast and loose, as MacDiarmid did when assembling some of his lyrics ...”

“... the effect of her collection of queer hats and sticks, her face ‘pale as sand’, pale as her white stockings, and also, I think, of her apparent obsession with death. She was interested in death, and particularly in its willingness to oblige, she had survived a suicide attempt in 1953, she was touched by the silence of the ‘countless, countless ...”

“... Sloane Ranger stratum as well. The Figaro carries a piece about jeunes filles. At a ball they wear white tulle from couture houses to dance with uniformed boys from the Polytechnique. Bridge lessons, single-string pearls, Maman’s cocktail parties, engraved invitations, an engagement ring by 20 at all costs. The difference now, says the writer, is that the ...”

“... scar. How can the celebrity outsider maintain a sense of his identity, or painterly authority, when he is his own subject-matter and his audience sees that subject-matter as ‘other’, less than ‘us’? Basquiat’s solutions to this dilemma are often brilliant. In the triptych Zydeco (1984), for example, a cinematographer in profile looks through the lens of his movie camera ...”

“... a room in Beirut and engaged Matisse as decorator. The sunlit balcony looked onto a blue sea. The white wooden table beside my transatlantique held a sliced melon. Hibiscus bloomed nearby. Some other fragrance that I could not and cannot name is still available to my senses, as arc the other wholly abstract elements of this notional construct, invulnerable to ...”

“... understand/why guacamole is/extra/it is because/you/were never/enough – rupi kaur.’ William Carlos Williams is up there with her as a parodied subject, racking up thousands of posthumous likes for internet rewritings of ‘This Is Just to Say’ – the plums and icebox poem which can handily be tweaked in the Notes app on an iPhone. ‘I have ...”