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“... described in broken washes and fine hatched lines and rows of dots which leave the texture of the white paper showing through. The lines describing curves are precise – each the result of a whole-arm movement, not a finger-driven squiggle. The width of the lines varies as pressure on the brush increases and decreases. Ravilious was an engraver; it is no ...”

“... For Esmé with Love and Squalor) gives a notion of why. The Penguin Franny and Zooey is black and white type on silver. But readers too are easily unsettled. When Penguin had paperback rights to Anthony Powell’s Dance to the Music of Time, the covers used drawings by Osbert Lancaster. Later, when Powell moved publishers, there were drawings by Marc ...”

“... the concern of ornithologists about its threat to the racial purity of its Spanish relation, the white-fronted duck.The human population in the park changes, too. There is a rumour that the number of young Australians and South Africans in Southfields is in the tens of thousands. Whatever the figure, it has been enough to change the culture of the ...”

“... as a novelist that he will continue to be known most widely. His third and most recent novel, The White Hotel, has been especially successful in America, with the film rights lately sold for half a million dollars.* In his literary sympathies as well as his choice of subjects Thomas has tended to be something of an outsider in this country, and in his free ...”

“... the early 1990s, the historian Gretchen Gerzina went to a London bookshop looking for a copy of Peter Fryer’s Staying Power: The History of Black People in Britain (1984). When she asked the shop assistant for help she was told ‘Madam, there were no black people in England before 1945.’ In fact, as David Olusoga’s remarkable book shows, people ...”

“... it to them. Cats’ Eyes is a book of, to my eye, rather repellently neat and stylised black and white illustrations. But it is much more interesting and amusing than many prettier productions. More a piece of feline sociology than a story, it describes the life of Tiger from birth to death, showing the world from cat level and through ...”

“... starched butterfly collars and a narrow black tie. His drawing-rooms had black walls (semi-gloss), white ceilings and woodwork, green painted floors and yellow curtains. Much of what is reported of Lutyens suggests that, often in admirable ways, he never grew up. The jokes, puns and flippancy, which he used to cover his sense of social inadequacy, the funny ...”

“... in irregular employment and part-time art education. He could not draw well enough for Mr Leyshon-White’s commercial art agency, so he ran the correspondence course. He enjoyed writing to rural amateurs telling them how bad their work was. Later he made advertising displays and did a little modelling for a hat company. He read a great deal, and made ...”

“... drink and sex and sleep; at midnight some of them dress up in black, with blackened faces, some in white, with whitened faces, and sally forth. Some scholars have read this scene as serious ritual; others as a typological orgie de brigands with satanic trimmings. The cynics are surely right. In the black and ...”

“... would probably rather have made his mark as a writer than as an editor. His first wife was Antonia White, and he desbribes how they would ‘sit for as many hours as we could allow or keep awake at our two desks. What I was writing was a novel – unpublished and happily never to be published – about a young man who gets involved in advertising when he wants ...”

“... veterans at a memorial parade. (Some objects are luckier in their materials: Hermann Gretsch’s white porcelain tableware, for example, or the Tatra T87 saloon car are showroom-fresh.) Modernism was an expression of faith in the human race’s ability to improve both itself and its surroundings. If you brought back a team of early Modernists and wanted to ...”

“... the lonely magazine, a year old, that combined, with a small lamp in coloured glass and a knitted white centre-piece wanting in freshness, to enhance the effect of the purplish cloth on the principal table; she had above all, from time to time, taken a brief stand on the small balcony to which the pair of long windows gave access. The vulgar little street, in ...”

“... events. Take Dancing Up Country, an aquatint by Dorothy Napangardi made up of hundreds of small white dots. They form a regular grid over which broader skeins flow – think of the lights of a city where a freeway crosses suburbs seen from a plane at night. Even when you are told what it represents – ‘chaotic and violent encounters between … two ...”

“... coloured), mainly in ink, most shapes quite (but not too) tidily filled in with white gouache, pale watercolour, acrylic, crayon, resin or varnish. Among the groups set out in the list of plates in the catalogue (from the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles where the show originated) are ‘tables and chairs’, ‘floors’, ‘beds and ...”

“... Stanford mansion: dark rooms, much carved and polished wood and stone, heavy drapes setting off white marble statuary. Eadweard Muybridge, ‘Emptying Bucket of Water, Plate 404’ (1887) San Francisco, made rich by the goldrush of the 1850s, was on the verge of being made even richer by the new transcontinental railway. It was a good place for a ...”