Search Results

“... the ground was Bride Caskey, and Claffey was on top of her. He saw that Claffey’s buttocks were white, and meagre in form though energetic in action, and that the woman’s eyes were closed and that she was bleeding from her mouth. Her kerchief was pulled off her head and laid beside her, lifting in the wind; the merest inch was trapped beneath the boot of ...”

“... she was sent, as if to complete the gothic theme, to the same awful convent school that Antonia White attended and wrote about in Frost in May. Vicious nuns, a minimal education for middle-class marriage and – something, at least – a powerful enemy to kick against. As an adult she would spit on the street if she saw nuns. Earlier, she had a more ...”

“... often blacked-up Jews and Irishmen who may have hoped to ingratiate themselves in this way with white society. Noses are of supreme importance. According to one phrenologist, ‘the nose alone . . . tells the story of its wearer’s rank and condition.’ In the view of one O.S. Fowler, acquisitiveness ‘is on each side of the middle portion of the nose ...”

“... Party’s campaign to smear one of its most effective and consistent opponents’, namely William Randolph Hearst, had long been interested in Welles. He was regarded as a threat, and placed on the FBI Security Index largely because of his political activities on behalf of the committee organised to defend the beleaguered Communist labour leader Harry ...”

“... with any aspect of foreign policy … I can confirm that there have never been, whether in White House talks, in telegrams, in ambassadorial approaches, or even on the hot line, any attempts to link Vietnam with economic or monetary co-operation. In a cabinet meeting in February 1966 Wilson again denied the link, and Richard Crossman, the minister of ...”

“... dropsy. There were further indignities. In 1810, a menagerie owner called Mr Brookes imported a ‘white camel’ to Britain. The beast was a ‘novelty’ in London, but Brookes wanted it to be ‘still more novel’ and ‘caused it to be artificially spotted and produced it to the public as a camelopard’. (The fraud was discovered by some ‘scientific ...”

“... a pale English rose: before dying, she stood ‘for one moment to her full height, naked, snow-white against the dusky mass around’. The painter Charles William Mitchell was so excited by this vision that he portrayed Hypatia leaning naked against an altar: her left arm stretches upwards – perhaps illustrating pagan ...”

“... the surplus population’. But Malthus was not what Wilson supposes: he criticised utopians like William Godwin for ignoring the risks of untrammelled population growth, but rather than advocating acquiescence in death by famine, he insisted that ‘sufficient yet remains to be done … to animate us to the most unremitted exertion.’ Wilson is ...”

“... decided to build nuclear weapons in January 1947, and to set up British Camps X, W and Y. William Penney, who had worked at Los Alamos, was chosen to direct the Atomic Weapon Research Establishment at Aldermaston in Berkshire, which was to be the British equivalent of Los Alamos and Arzamas-16; Capenhurst in Cheshire was chosen to house the uranium ...”

“... name for my own blueberry-loving toddler than the jubilant More Fruit. In 1603 the antiquary William Camden cited the new practice among the gentry of using surnames as first names, pointing to Grevill Varney, Bassingburne Gawdy and Calthorp Parker: ‘Although many dislike it, for the great inconvenience that will ensue … neverthelesse it seemeth to ...”

“... forgotten, at least in comparison to later researchers of sexuality such as Virginia Johnson, William Masters and Alfred Kinsey. In Blackouts, Torres sets out to correct the historical record by telling the fictional story of a young man encountering Sex Variants and learning about its origins from an older man, Juan Gay, who knew Jan Gay ...”

“... sort’, but ‘with much to contend with: among other things a terrific wife with a large head of white hair and tortoiseshell spectacles, who appears to be the worst scandalmonger in the county’. James regularly visited Herefordshire to stay with Gwendolen McBryde, an eccentric widow who ran a stud farm. She had married a close friend from his ...”

“... space, or time; here, it was the opposite. The Ellington and Hereson School is a set of shining white blocks built in 2007 as part of Labour’s PFI programme. As well as Farage, Charlie Leys, the sixth-former who had organised and was chairing the event, had managed to pull in South Thanet’s sitting Tory MP, Laura Sandys, a believer in EU membership who ...”

“... Washington rival) George Croghan into Ohio Country with a pack train of goods, including enough white linen shirts to clothe half the male Indian population, in an attempt to start realising its vision of imperial-Native co-prosperity, it was attacked in 1765 by a gang of American settlers (‘the Black Boys’) dressed up as Indians with charcoaled ...”

“... for this was Protestant-ruled Northern Ireland in the 1950s, a place not altogether unlike the white-ruled South Africa evoked in the frank confessional of David Schalkwyk’s opening chapter. In the apartheid world, the young Schalkwyk ‘was defined legally, socially and … psychologically as a “master”’, even as the material realities of bondage ...”