“... a parcel for you.’ Bond clawed at the parcel with a hand on which he could still see the white outline of the skin-graft he’d had between Casino Royale and Live and Let Die. These physical details from his past made him feel real. ‘Let me,’ sighed the nurse. Basic parcel protocol flashed into his mind. He muttered ‘Bomb’. ‘That’s no ...”

“... has an ancestry like that of Rhiannon and Malcolm; he is surely descended from the incorrigible Patrick of the earlier book who lamentably rapes the gentle Jenny instead of marrying her the first time round: an attractive and intelligent if callow cricket-playing Classics master, as ‘English’ an archetype as one could find in the modern novel. Alun and ...”

“... Giraud, otherwise known as ‘Hector the Mulatto’. Though the term ‘mulatto’ implied some ‘white’ parentage, Giraud was also described as a ‘free-born black’ from Martinique, an island on the other side of the French colonial empire. More immediately, he had come from Paris, where he had been put in the Châtelet prison and then, to his ...”

“... are part-African’, Mechal Sobel argues that in 18th-century Virginia, despite the tyranny of white over black, cultural interaction occurred constantly. ‘Work became essentially a black domain, and working whites worked in it.’ On ‘King’ Carter’s estates in the 1730s, 1000 black slaves toiled under eight ...”

“... that held them prisoner. The message the dwellings tapped out was simple: ‘tear us down.’ The white lettering was a suicide note. The photographer found a window slit in which to execute my ringing head in a cage of stalactites. I perched on tiptoe above the shifting slithering carpet of a flooded khazi that some trainee heritage pirate had tried to ...”

“... further reproduction of his shameful imaginings’). This time there’s a plot: the young (white) lesbian wife of a grand, gay (white) Southern poet runs off with her infant daughter and conceals herself from his inquiries by passing as a black lone parent. The racial caste system in rural Virginia being what it ...”

“... and Bliss, a boy of mysterious parentage raised in the black church, who has fled North, passed as white, and become Adam Sunraider, the racist New England Senator. As Callahan has put it together, the novel begins with the failed effort of Hickman and his flock to warn Sunraider that a young black man is out to assassinate him. Organised as a set of ...”

“... Bill Clinton’s one-time aide and press secretary, published a memoir of his time in the White House entitled All Too Human: A Political Education. Back then, it seemed like a terribly exciting book: 1999 was the year of Clinton’s Senate trial, following his impeachment, and also of the first appearance on US television of The West Wing, which ...”

“... of Scotland mission colleges would educate critical generations to struggle against the racism of white settlers. As a journalist on the Scotsman in 1959, I saw at first hand how the Church of Scotland missions in Nyasaland (now Malawi) successfully crippled the British government’s sinister ‘federation’ scheme, designed to put all Central Africa under ...”

“... the rights and wrongs. The place was ours, and we went and took it back.’ In The Winter War, Patrick Bishop and John Witherow (who went with the Task Force for the Observer and the Times) conclude: The war had everything in its favour. It was neat and tidy. It had a simple motive and a simple response … No war is to be wished for, but if they have to ...”

“... incidence of the virus has already moved from a relatively restricted ‘ghetto’ of mainly white male gays into the far broader (and mainly black) heterosexual population. Everything we know about that population’s vulnerable health status, its powerful resistance to counsels of sexual abstinence and contraception, and its lack of access both to ...”

“... deprived of each other, as Irish life would have it. He imagines Claus von Stauffenberg talking to Patrick Pearse, the language barrier overcome by the strength of their beliefs: ‘They were not afraid to lose.’ Jack should not fear losing either, although he does, the attrition of idealism catching up with him. But reluctantly, though in the end ...”

“... Maurice Hewlett and my favourite, the Arthur Conan Doyle of the Brigadier Gerard stories and The White Company. As Adrian and Michael Cox’s Oxford Book of Historical Stories may confirm in due course, I suspect that there has been a continuous tradition from the great Victorians right through to Patrick O’Brian ...”

“... are appointed.Starmer has given jobs to several well-known individuals from outside Parliament. Patrick Vallance, the new minister for science, appeared regularly on the televised coronavirus updates. Jacqui Smith, the new minister for higher education, became the first female home secretary in 2007, but has not been a member of Parliament since 2010. James ...”

“... at birth with some presentiment of loss.We catch another glimpse of Quintana, aged three, in The White Album, this time at the Royal Hawaiian Hotel in Honolulu, ‘blonde and barefoot, a child of paradise in a frangipani lei’. Didion reports that Quintana wanted to go to the beach. ‘She cannot go to the beach,’ she writes, ‘because there has been an ...”