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“... he was pestering her … she will tell you that Fahmy kept a black valet to watch over this white woman’s suite of rooms, conditions that really make me shudder, [placing her] in that state of obedience which a black man wants from a woman who is his chattel. No one objected, though nowadays such a speech would get an advocate disbarred. Madame ...”

“... the image of loss comes hard on a reference to Synge’s Riders to the Sea:in Maurya’s speech‘White boards’ are like storm-gleams on the floodAt the very end, or the salt salvaged markingsOf a raft for books, a bier to be borne.I imagine us bracing ourselves for the first lift,Then staggering for balance, it has grown so light.This collection is full of ...”

“... In 1969 Norman Mailer ran for mayor of New York. He called for the city’s secession from the State of New York to become the 51st state; a ban on private cars in Manhattan; free public bicycles; devolution of powers over policing, education, housing and welfare to neighbourhood authorities; a casino on Coney Island or Roosevelt Island to generate tax revenue; and something called ‘Sweet Sundays’, one day each month on which all mechanical transportation, including lifts, would be banned ...”

“... 2011 Jencks used one of Vriesendorp’s illustrations, in which Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim and Norman Foster’s Gherkin float on a grid of small islands, as the cover for The Story of Post Modernism. Vriesendorp’s Enigmatic Signifier sketches for Jencks’s book combine aspects of the surreal and sexy in their reimagining of key postmodern ...”

“... the throne in memory of his brother’. Once again there was going to be a Kennedy in the White House.‘We’re going to win,’ I said to myself for the first time. ‘The war will be over in January. Our soldiers are coming home. Instead of building million-dollar bombers, our country will spend that money constructing schools and health centres ...”

“... pimp roll’. Sherman feels as generations of blacks must have done when confronted with the white-sheeted lynch mob: ‘the one nearest him had on a silvery basket-ball warm-up jacket with CELTICS written across the chest ... He was no more than four or five steps away ... powerfully built ... His jacket was open ... a ...”

“... court to Castro, interviewing him on his bed and after thirty minutes declaring him ‘the only white person I have really liked’. But racial politics in Cuba would become a sore point for many of the black nationalists who visited Cuba in the course of the following decade. Some Afro-Cubans had identified with the non-...”

“... as ‘apprentices’. Dawkins Pennant put some of this money into building Penrhyn Castle as a neo-Norman fantasia, but though a large sum at the time, it paled in comparison to the riches he and his forebears had accumulated during their decades of slave ownership. His fortune at his death in 1840 was an estimated £600,000. By the end of the 19th ...”

“... movie – I don’t see too many movies but I try to see them on weekends when I am at the Western White House or in Florida – and the movie I selected, or, as a matter of fact, my daughter Tricia selected it, was Chisum with John Wayne. It was a Western. FDR was known to admire Myrna Loy and Ike to enjoy watching shoot-’em-ups; underdog Harry Truman had ...”

“... piece by piece after the Second World War; now, after years of degeneration following the white man’s departure, the empires that ruled Africa and Asia don’t seem quite as bad. The perplexingly affirmative work of Niall Ferguson and David Armitage scants, if it doesn’t actually trivialise, the suffering and dispossession brought by empire to its ...”

“... athletic cosmology of boars, bees, angels and divine goddesses, the Red Dragon of Britain and the White Dragon of Anglo-Saxon Wessex both bowing before the Norman Red Lion. When there was a plan to erect a 25-foot bronze unicorn fountain in Parliament Square, a project postponed for want of money, the Poet Laureate ...”

“... students – mostly male and many of them in dinner jackets – was ‘an equality among rich white men’. This left out most people: white women, men and women of colour, and ‘the survivors of that slaughter of the Indigenous peoples’. It constituted an assault on their ‘freedom, legal and social ...”

“... Tom Wolfe is, in many ways, an outrageous figure – with his white suit and cane, his glib social analyses, and his delusions of grandeur. For three decades he has been saying that his minutely researched books herald ‘a revolution’ in literature, which is bound to ‘sweep the arts in America, making many prestigious artists … appear effete and irrelevant ...”

“... 1890s to 1940. It was written over the course of four years but reads as if it had been done in white heat over six weeks; each written page represents the compression of a thousand pages read. The moral pressure is extraordinary: with just a few happy exceptions, the story of each writer is told as a miniature tragedy, a squandered opportunity, a ...”

“... Norman Tebbit announced the other day that Tony Blair’s government had made both obesity and Aids in this country much worse by doing ‘everything it can to promote buggery’. Aside from anything else, this comment might cause us to reflect (buggerishly) on the England beloved of bigots like Tebbit and to see it as a land not only of warm beer and cricket on the village green, but also, more significantly, of generations of excellent buggers performing on radio, stage and television, warming the cockles of English hearts and occasionally laying down their trousers in pursuit of their genius ...”