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“... runs off, leaving behind almost a million pounds in cash and some large bags of unidentified white powder (‘Why don’t you taste it like in the movies?’ ‘Because I still wouldn’t know what it was’), it comes as no great surprise that they decide to keep the lot. Equally unsurprising are their subsequent fallings-out, fears of being caught and ...”

“... 1958 in New York City. ‘It was wonderful, and revelatory as it always is,’ he told his friend Tony White. ‘I learn more about people and myself in NY than anywhere else. I got offered a job in a tough-queer 3rd Avenue bar the day before I left, and if I hadn’t been under contract to Berkeley I’d have accepted it’ (he’d been given a visiting ...”

“... bridal gownshop’s lights are only on, in winter, Saturday nights. Though window shopping for white wedding gear ’s not done this coldest, darkest time of year, maybe, the owner reckons, as they pass those near-nude girls, reflected in the glass, might remember his window’s lacy white, if they get pregnant from ...”

“... pears, a fragrant herb to smell, thyme, basil, oregano . . . a red pomegranate flower a sprig of white jasmine. Then as we walked, hot and thirsty, a groaning green truck laden with leafy oranges driven by a black-clad priest drove past us. ‘Catch!’ he cried. The flung rogue orange rolled down the dusty hill till stopped by a wicket of three roadside ...”

“... on an echocardiogram in synch with karaoke squid shapes on the screen, I hear now with a woman in white coat. Though not iambic, more fluttery trochee, the odd dochmaic, anapaest, I note the verse in my pounding heart at least’s not free. The beat’s in a blood wash, the sound’s more a factory filled most hours but now forlorn where a nightshift cleaner ...”

“... got clarted with thick lard and slack and newsprint from the crumpled Yorkshire Post, and made the white bread finger-marked and black when I used the fire I’d lit to make us toast. Why can’t my memory home in on just that? Through the griefguard round the glow we all sat near burst sputterings of polished wood and fat, then smoke I crane my neck at to ...”

“... just walked up and down Vesuvio as Goethe did two centuries ago. At the bottom with a bottle of white wine I heard the great poet talking to Tischbein: Vesuvio puffing smoke out not far off flavours this fine vino that we quaff. That force that belches forth its molten mass has poured this tinkling gold in my raised glass. Devastation, Tischbein, ancient ...”

“... the page. L and M are the only characters in the book who aren’t given proper names. There’s Tony, M’s prematurely white-haired, ethnically indeterminate husband; Justine, her mousy, semi-estranged daughter from a previous relationship; Kurt, Justine’s foolish, ill-at-ease paramour; and Brett, L’s young and ...”

“... the 0,10 exhibition Malevich showed 39 paintings bearing only the simplest geometric forms against white backgrounds – Black Square (1915) the starkest of all. He himself saw it as the point of origin for his new system, calling it the ‘embryo of all possibilities’; he hung it in the top corner of the room, where Orthodox Russians traditionally place an ...”

“... of cadmium red weaving across the land like lava, or uranium tailings coating the ground with a white residue. In 2010, he took several photographs of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill from a helicopter above the Gulf of Mexico: the human presence – boats and drilling rigs – is tiny compared with the vast slick that occupies most of the image, in some ...”

“... to read the signs, the measured droop of Lord Bragg’s handkerchief, the precise organisation of Tony Blair’s latest consensus hair policy, Lord Archer’s ironic, pre-penitentiary crop, the way Andrew Motion carries off his loden coat as he swirls between taxi and station platform. Julian Barnes’s novels are depilated at source, fat-free. Frisking them ...”

“... affiliations. Many poems in this new collection are tokens of affection, offerings to friends – Tony White, Mary Ure, a dying poet. A few are more public, like the rather unquestioning poem about the Long Kesh hunger-strikers. There is a weirdly memorable poem about a poisoned goat. Fifty sonnets are about buildings, and the price of them: Nelson’s ...”

“... clear. To imagine herself so stooping is a feat as hard as that of gymnasts she has seen lissom in white leotards compete in trampolining on the TV screen. There’s one with her mashed dinner who can’t summon yet again the appetite to smear the food about the shrunk face of a woman weeping for death in her 92nd year. And of the life she lived remembers ...”

“... 2018, Trump apparently asked aides why the US couldn’t just invade. But until last month, the White House’s preferred scenario was for the Venezuelan army to get rid of Maduro on its behalf. In February 2018 the then secretary of state, Rex Tillerson, casually speculated about the possibility of a military coup, and in September the New York Times ...”

“... Tim Lott’s first novel, White City Blue, came out in 1999. The narrator, Frankie Blue, is a West London estate agent. His best friends are Tony, Nodge and Colin. Diamond Tony – formally, Anthony Diamonte – is a flash Italian hairdresser: handsome, charming, apparently successful, he has a flair for cruelty ...”