“... he said quietly. ‘She says I should stay at home, nice and cosy. That I should wear the white jumper. She makes oliebollen with the wrong pieces of apple … Almighty, everlasting, she thought she was buying wine, but it was fruit juice. The sweet, good woman. Berry-apple. She moves her head back and forth when she reads. She is my mother. See her ...”

“... that is uncalled-for, unearned even, and so it is annoying too: the crosshatched brushstrokes of white emulsion are accidental; the crab’s golden-orange back is just on its way to ruin; the expensive haircut looks its best after eight hours of your lying on it. The beauty doesn’t last – it isn’t meant to. It is something that happens along the ...”

“... owe everything to memories of my mother and her struggle.’ The American cover has a black and white photograph of a boy and a woman in bed, their foreheads touching in a maternal embrace. (On the British cover, a boy sits on a post that looks not unlike a cross.) Much of the story is excruciating, and it is in a long line of books with trauma as the main ...”

“... researching Jean Harlow didn’t know how to use her allure. Carr relates a date with the curator Sam Green:The moment [Green] remembered most came near the end of the evening, when Phebe’s had emptied and waiters were upending chairs onto tables. Candy reached over to Green and, in his words, ‘put those long thin fingers on top of my hand, rested them ...”

“... that future contestants for the Lonsdale Belt ‘must be legally British subjects born of white parents’. This colour bar was eagerly promoted by Lord Lonsdale himself, with the connivance of the home secretary, Winston Churchill. Boxing was, nevertheless, to become a route to fame and fortune for many young black Britons, as it was for many Jewish ...”

“... the way of its being punished as a crime. At the very outset of his government, he pulled into the White House an ambiguous figure from the Bush-Cheney years, John Brennan. As a high official of the CIA under George Tenet, Brennan had registered a dissenting view of the interrogation techniques in 2001 and 2002, but took care to do so in a way that would ...”

“... possibility of a ‘life-size cold-cast bronze or copper statue of Elvis’ at £25,000. Pure white hand-polished busts of Elvis come in beautiful ‘marbelene’. Item G21 in the list is the Memorial Elvis Pillow, a tasselled affair inscribed in Victorian homily-Gothic lettering, God knew Elvis Was tired, so he Took him to Rest. The ‘Fantastic Elvis ...”

“... But then art history is a discipline still shaped by what Nochlin described in 1971 as ‘the white-male-position-accepted-as-natural’. This goes for the art we see too: in 2019 the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington DC reported that 87 per cent of the artists represented in US museums were men.‘Why Have There Been No Great Women ...”

“... and sometimes desperate circumstances, he told anyone who would listen that he was headed for the White House. He mapped out a plan to get there from which, as Robert Caro writes, ‘he refused to be diverted.’ It meant first establishing himself in state politics, then winning a seat in the House of Representatives, then moving up to the Senate and finally ...”

“... rebellion. Cambridge had a second objective too. Mr Brown, Flanigan writes, ‘like too many other white men in this island, carried on an amour with a woman belonging to the property, named Christiana, and it was the first intention of Cambridge to murder her as well as the overseer, supposing it was through her communications that so many discoveries of ...”

“... whoop down the avenue. The people who stopped put both hands on the Ferragamo window and the white light made each one a little blonder. One woman said ‘beautiful’; the glass misted up in front of her mouth. I walked on a few blocks. There was a midnight service going on at St Patrick’s Cathedral. A long queue stretched all the way down to the ...”

“... he really had died and she just stood there in the middle, and tears ran down her face, leaving white trickles as it washed the dirt away. Nothing could have been more just than the social changes that have swept this all aside. But, Gathorne-Hardy muses, ‘walking down the long close-packed rows in local geriatric hospitals, going into yet another tiny ...”

“... the people (or at least the minority of the population eligible to vote in each state, generally white men with property), but most of the framers believed that unrestrained democracy was as dangerous as tyranny. Placing prominent men of ‘discernment’ between the electorate and the final outcome, Alexander Hamilton insisted, would hold popular passions ...”

“... The favourite jokes are well chosen: ‘scene but not herd’, ‘in the days when England was a White’s man’s country’, ‘christened her Marigold and hoped she would’. So are the photographs, particularly of Sloanes at play. The maxims are both valid and pithy: ‘A Sloanie has a pony,’ ‘Anyone who has read Proust is not a Sloane ...”

“... And from Bonar Law to Hugh Gaitskell, he had better taste than the market sociologists, though Sam Hoare was a duff choice. The clean, politically-motivated, pre-marketing Express was beyond comparison better-selling than the slightly soiled, politically auto-piloted and consultant-plagued Express of today. It also sold as well as and for longer than the ...”