“... visions he entertained. The fiasco over the proposed reforms to trade union law in the 1969 White Paper In Place of Strife may have been the low point of Wilson’s premiership. The TUC eventually gave its ‘solemn and binding’ undertaking to moderate wage demands if the legislation was abandoned. The Economist called the arrangement ‘In Place of ...”

“... As Rogan admits, postcolonial and feminist critiques challenged the concentration on the white male working class that structured Tawney and Thompson’s work and Polanyi’s anthropology of ‘primitive’ communities. The theme of Anglo-Saxon liberties and freeborn Englishmen – crucial to Thompson’s portrayal of the constitutionalist tradition ...”

“... texts of the modern history of slavery, John Hope Franklin’s From Slavery to Freedom in 1947 and Kenneth Stampp’s The Peculiar Institution in 1956, has any serious history book claimed that slavery was a benign paternalistic institution. No one has argued that it was anything other than the great moral stain on the American conscience. The view that the ...”

“... contract yet? To compensate, Manson’s pronouncements became more apocalyptic when the Beatles’ White Album came out at the end of 1968. Its songs contained prophetic codes about a coming race war (called ‘Helter Skelter’): the blacks would rise up and enslave the white pigs; the Family would wait out the carnage in a ...”

“... zone in the country that would attract $800 million of investment. Zambia’s former president, Kenneth Kaunda, received him personally, and the Chinese president delivered his usual speech: ‘China is happy to have Zambia as a good friend, good partner, and a good brother.’ Two years earlier, around fifty Zambians were killed in an accident at an ...”

“... The charioteer is the rational part of the soul, wrestling to impose balance on his two horses: a white one, which represents the moral, spiritual impulse, and a black, which signifies base, impulsive appetites. In England it became a cause célèbre and a huge success. In McCarthyite America, where sexual perverts and communists were monster pariahs, it ...”

“... downstairs, now comes up and at the sight of a third party he takes fright, retreating to a white van waiting opposite with its engine running which drives off so quickly I fail to get the number. Thinking about it afterwards, where he went wrong was in not being ingratiating enough or trying to explain what the ‘drain problem’ was and graduating ...”

“... wave-line may wait to fall,yet (waiting for its falling)still the wind may take,from off its crest,white flake on flake of foam,that risesseeming to dart and pulseand rend the light,so my mind hesitatesabove the passionquivering yet to break[…]will the sound break at lastas the wave hesitant,or will the whole night passand I lie listening awake?H.D.’s ...”

“... wearing elements of a bullfighter costume (red velvet jacket and a black montera hat) along with a white football shirt, yellow socks and black loafers, is confronted by a group of toreros wielding English-branded banderillas – barbed sticks wrapped in the colours of the St George’s Cross. Soon three or four banderillas are hanging from Sterling’s ...”

“... moving to New York in 1924. She was friendly with Ruth Benedict and Margaret Mead, and Roth met Kenneth Burke, Hart Crane, James T. Farrell and Thomas Wolfe at her salon on 61 Morton Street. She set out to make an intellectual of him in the manner of Henry Higgins, Kellman says, and he suspects that her mentoring of young Jewish men – Roth and Winter ...”

“... from another, and music from Guy Lombardo and his Royal Canadians, the maestros of cheesy white pop. For the first decade or so of his career, Moses preserved his youthful attachment to the ideals of the Progressive movement – parks for the people, clean government by the competent – and pursued power for the sake of those ideals. But from 1934 ...”

“... rustics eating crustless Ruskets’; the strip cartoon by Jules Feiffer; the witty reviews by Kenneth Tynan of plays that we had next to no chance of seeing; the house adverts by the subversive estate agent Roy Brooks that my brother read aloud (‘The décor is revolting … rain drips sadly onto the oilcloth … sacrifice £3500’). As Jeremy Lewis ...”

“... dignity and self-respect, and thinks they have a case against American society – but thinks the white student radicals were just spoilt and ungrateful kids, peeing on the carpet that welcomed them. One of these delinquents, famously photographed during the occupation smoking a cigar, with his feet on the university president’s desk, later called to ask ...”

“... are seismic, memories photographic, deaths sad, suicides tragic. If anyone creates it’s at white heat. ‘Pinter’s openings are always good,’ Billington writes; ‘this one is no exception.’ Spot on. Billington gives a coherent account of Pinter’s career, from his early days in Jewish Hackney through Hackney Downs Grammar School, Rada and an ...”

“... dogfish that flourishes in literary backwaters. ‘Christina Stead is not a very good writer,’ Kenneth Seaforth Mackenzie declared. ‘She has told the tale ... with about twice as many words as any competent romantic novelist would use.’ This is one of the two novels which, 35 years later, Angela Carter would rate as more important than The Golden ...”