“... Brunswick Town Hall, an inner suburb of Melbourne. It was to be addressed by the Aboriginal leader Patrick Dodson, on the theme of reconciliation. Knowing the unpunctuality of left-wing events, I put off driving down Sydney Road until a quarter of an hour before the talk was due to start: a bad mistake. It took twenty minutes to get through the queues and find ...”

“... like the walls of Kabul, made of warm, sagging, straw-flecked mud: they are rigid blocks of grey-white stone. Foreigners have consistently perceived this aspect of the city as – in the words of the French gem-hunter Jean-Baptiste Tavernier in 1640 – ‘not very handsome’, or, in the words of Bartholomew Plaisted in 1752, ‘very disagreeable to ...”

“... countries between the wars. Fish doesn’t mention The Rising Tide of Colour against White World-Supremacy (1920), by the eugenicist Lothrop Stoddard. This is clearly the book that Scott Fitzgerald was thinking of when he had Tom Buchanan say, in the opening chapter of The Great Gatsby, ‘Have you read The Rise of the Coloured Empires by this ...”

“... suited it in Armani, gave it a facial peel and took it out for a prowl, installed its protagonist, Patrick Bateman, as an archetype of the metrosexual serial killer and elevated its author to public enemy number one in much of the literary world. The fury in the novel and the fury towards Ellis formed a feedback loop that has tramp-stamped his subsequent ...”

“... are blitzed. The letter can be found in One Family’s War, compiled by Christopher’s brother Patrick from the wartime correspondence of a large, affectionate, disputatious and very literate cousinage. Patrick began as a conscientious objector in the Medical Corps, but after winning a Military Medal for his heroism in ...”

“... the dining room, of the bathroom, the washstand, the gingham tablecloth, the patterned towel, the white teapot. It’s one of the nice effects of Bonnard’s pictures that these places and things quickly become familiar to the viewer too, so that even in the course of a single exhibition, like the one currently at Tate Modern (until 6 May), we begin to feel ...”

“... which has sometimes won me the reputation of an eccentric,’ Graves writes at the start of The White Goddess (1948), his synoptic account of the history of Western myth. His eccentricity took many forms, as many as the mercurial goddess herself, yet Graves seems never to have doubted the central narrative to which his life and work were dedicated: There ...”

“... or third hand, that sometimes strain credulity. Carrington lived in the same London square as one Patrick Maitland, to whom, according to Junor, he never deigned to speak. But then Maitland inherited an earldom, and his lordship was evidently on the line on the first day of his neighbour’s succession with the amiable cry, ‘Good morning, ...”

“... revivalism with ‘what used to be called “muscular Christianity” ’. Going into the fight ‘white’, indeed, was a concept Pearse would have cherished. Deane and Hubert Butler are both authoritative commentators on the depleted condition of Irish letters during the middle part of the present century – ‘once the major excitements of the Revival were ...”

“... parts. Within a generation, there was little to distinguish these American refugees from other white British imperial subjects trying to get by in a global empire. But while they retained their affiliations with the British Empire, departing loyalists also left a great deal behind in America: jobs, homes, property and, most of all, people. In this ...”

“... poets to Minneapolis’s Washington Avenue Bridge, where John Berryman jumped to his death; the White Horse Tavern, where Dylan Thomas supposedly drank the 18 whiskeys that killed him; 23 Fitzroy Road, where Plath laid her head on a folded towel in the gas oven; Missolonghi, per Byron; Rome, to the Keats-Shelley House; Vienna, where Auden bore out his own ...”

“... number of affluent South and Central Americans.The local ‘Anglos’, as the non-Hispanic, white Miamians are called rather disdainfully by everyone including themselves, seem to be steadily moving away. Some leave because, allegedly, they can’t stand the reactionary character of Miami today. Others, more forthrightly perhaps, admit that they simply ...”

“... Englishman’, welcomed back to ‘his’ country. His wife came, as he did, from an elite white dynasty and his children, though they were born in Jamaica, inherited his birthright. (The children of enslaved women inherited their mothers’ status and were born enslaved.) Long had made enough money from his cane fields and enslaved labour to return ...”

“... ministers, cabinets, parliaments, regional administrators, mayors, town councils – for the white, Coloured and Indian communities. Each parliament, whose respective membership, mainly elected but partly nominated, is determined by the magic formula 4-2-1 which corresponds roughly to the relative sizes of the three populations, is to be entrusted with ...”

“... even those on the right, have approached their subject in a different spirit. In 2015 the Bush White House veteran Jonathan Horn published The Man Who Would Not Be Washington, a consideration of Lee’s failure to defend his country in its hour of need. Allen Guelzo’s new study goes further. An unusual figure in the American academy – an eminent Civil ...”