“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... display of anamorphosis. What appears, when viewed head on, to be a large, greyish-white streak between the men’s feet resolves, when viewed from the side, into a skull which seems to project from the wooden panel. Although most of Holbein’s surviving paintings are not signed, this one is. On the floor behind and to the left of ...”

“... founded by her friend, Fanny Wright. What Wright had in mind was a commune in which black and white children would be educated together in a Temple of Science. The Nashoba community also advocated the practice of free or ‘rational’ love. Mrs Trollope’s views on this and other aspects of the Nashoba programme, and the degree of her commitment to ...”

“... but thoughtful study, that most English of institutions was going strong long before then. Indeed, Sam Johnson’s beloved ‘clubbable’ men must have been in clover in 18th-century England. In those days Oxford offered the Eternal Club, the Jelly Bag Society, or the Town Smarts, whose members decked themselves out in ...”

“... culture. Or perhaps they are a red-state art form: patriotic, sentimental, hopelessly unhip and white, full of small-town values, at home in suburban high schools. Unlike jazz and film, which gained respectability as pop and TV supplanted their popularity, the musical holds its own lonely place in culture; it doesn’t quite belong to anyone. Raymond Knapp ...”

“... the stream, in punts and a 1920 Studebaker, come Asher’s Jewish ancestors: great-grandfather Sam Korelitz (a hardware store owner) and great-grandfather Jim Zabin (an ad-man), Helene Hanff, uncle Arnold Rothstein (who fixed the 1919 World Series) and Arnold’s friend Fanny Brice. Contrasted with these somewhat comical figures are the anonymous victims ...”

“... dressing? Val, the friend of British nationalists, of course.There aren’t enough members of the white race’s vanguard for the uniforms to come from a factory. They have to be home-made. The blue BM crossed-circle came as a machine-embroidered patch, but she was the one who had to get it to work on a khaki shirt, who had to make the jacket and the ...”

“... among ‘fucking queer intellectual bastards’. In no time he and Simon, dressed only in little white towels, are padding through a gay sauna near the Gare de Lyon in search of a young man called Hamed, to whom Barthes might have given a copy of the missing document. Hamed, they’ve been told, has a fringe and an earring, but the steam makes it hard to ...”

“... impossibly beautiful in a range of outfits, including a chest-hugging dark sundress and a clinging white one-piece swimming costume. Her character’s beauty is central to the plot because in the flashback sequences we learn that Sebastian is using her as bait to seduce young men. The script alludes to Catherine’s swimming costume becoming transparent in the ...”

“... we imagine between her face and her mask.’ The images of Doris Day (that blonde hair, those white teeth) and her personas as the spunky girl next door, the tightly wound career woman and the gung-ho housewife have been fixed for years now, but the person who played Doris Day is less clear. It’s difficult even to know what to call her. The band leader ...”

“... other questions didn’t make me doubt for one minute he could read my mind. John Gavin who played Sam in Psycho was Reagan’s ambassador to Mexico. Psycho was the first Hollywood film to show a toilet flush. Encopresis is another mental illness I suffered from. It involves farting. The initials of the history student, now a graduate, began appearing on ...”

“... First World War portrayed the Germans as ‘savage gorillas who threatened the purity of innocent white women’. Hitler seemed not to mind: one witness reported that he was ‘captivated’ by King Kong and ‘spoke of it often’. Indeed, the Führer watched a movie ‘every night before going to bed’. Greta Garbo was among his favourite actresses and ...”

“... are at least a dozen restaurants, one Kurdish, the rest Afghan: the Hamid Karzai Rastorant, the White Mountain, the Three Star Hotel. Khan, an Afghan from Kunduz who bakes bread at the White Mountain, makes €20 a day. Inside the restaurant, men sit, smoke shishas and talk. The Eritreans run a bar and nightclub, a dark ...”

“... But his collective observations of his jailers – especially the prison’s racial dynamics, with white guards dominating their black colleagues, and a Puerto Rican contingent showing the most sympathy to the jailed – are some of the book’s most striking details. (The broad outline of the abuses Slahi suffered, even the worst ones, has been a matter of ...”