The comedian Robert Newman once discussed why England’s football team wear white. Having invented football, he said, the English got to pick colours first. So they chose white, freighted with meaning and power, pure and existential.
Newman didn’t cite the greatest novel of all, Moby-Dick, but I will. Herman Melville wrote a whole chapter about white, the colour of his whale. He wrote of the “certain nameless terror” instilled by visions in white, whether sharks, bears, Death on his pale horse or even Iron Mike Teague. I might have added the last one.
