Shelgel spun around, his fair face reddening.
He was pointing to a beautiful youngster with black eyes, a journalist reported, "blushing all over her fair face".
In Jane Eyre, the unpleasant Blanche Ingram declares that an ugly woman is a blot on the fair face of creation, while men need possess only strength and valour.
"For 20 long years, BP has embedded its foulness deep within the Tate, using the fair face of the arts to mask the stench of its true nature," he explained.
In photographs and news footage of political demonstrations of the 1960s, Tariq Ali is unmistakeable: the thick black hair and thatchy moustache; the clenched fist and characteristic surge to the foreground amid a sea of fair faces.
"The morning would come and I would be so excited about seeing my new skin that I would refuse to look down at myself before I was in front of a mirror, because I wanted to see my fair face first.
The human sighs and says that during the times when the economic system was at its most cruel, the fair-skinned people invented a form of entertainment in which they painted their fair faces black so that they would look like an exaggerated version of the darker people.
The Holden Gallery, Mon to 12 Dec RC Titled Fair Faces, Dark Places, this show of prints and drawings by the late 19th-century Scottish artist harks back to a time when painstaking technical precision could be wielded both to immortalise the living and to give credible life to the farthest reaches of the subconscious.
He has a particular gift for amusing repartee, and he can do wisdom, too: "I understood there were times when we had to have death and violence," Billy concludes, "just as we had to have sex, or the bright fair face of a child looking straight into ours, or we had to notice, as we fell a thousand feet, what a beautiful morning it was".
She was probably the model for the stunningly erotic nude in Cupid and Psyche, bearing out the remark of a contemporary writer on art that her face was the least beautiful part of a beautiful woman: "though she hath a fair face beyond nature, yet putting off her clothes [she] seemeth to have no face at all, in regard of the other excellencies that were concealed".
