“... contract at every prancing step. Out of their pointed faces, out of their open mouths, over their white teeth, a flat but serpentine tongue lolls, laps, lets drop its spittle. All this is ghostly or demonic enough, but to it must be added the effect of their eyes, their swept-back ears, their polished pelts. Shining grey, shining black, brindle, fawn, ...”

“... was 18 years old.’ Later in the day, Houston encounters a ‘crew-cut man in his forties with a white towel hitched under his belly and a cigarette clamped between his front teeth’. This is Colonel Sands, a messianic CIA officer and veteran of the Second World War, who drinks too much and takes an unusual and obsessive interest in the tunnels that ...”

“... The claims were first published in 2012, in an Elephant Action League report called ‘Africa’s White Gold of Jihad: al-Shabaab and Conflict Ivory’, and gained traction after the attack on the Westgate Mall in Nairobi in September 2013, in which 62 people died.By 2015, the report’s central claims had been debunked as a gross exaggeration of the ...”

“... who end up abroad in flight from their creditors, the appalling shits who go off to do white mischief in the Kenyan highlands, the paranoid eccentrics who embrace ridiculous or distasteful political crusades, the pompous proconsuls who deceive themselves into mistaking the trappings for the power, and the deference-hungry nonentities who clutch at ...”

“... he would have been a disaster. His vision of human nature is utterly two-dimensional and black-and-white, and his political opinions are dogmatically prescriptive – with an arrogance that only the wholly immature or innocent ever dare show. His world is full of goodies and baddies. The goodies spend all their time in the ‘forefront of community ...”

“... VIP paedophile rings. It went big on ‘Pizzagate’, the bogus 2016 conspiracy theory spread by white supremacists proposing that the Democratic Party was concealing child abuse by senior officials. That’s not to suggest paedophile rings don’t exist, but you need to be careful about the way such allegations can be made to appear instantly substantial by ...”

“... of mounting a coup, an idea that came to Simon Mann as a result of his long association with Tony Buckingham’s Executive Outcomes in Angola. There mercenary success earned huge financial rewards: Buckingham walked away from that adventure worth some $150 million in oil and diamonds. Mann, an Old Etonian scion of the brewing family, seems to have ...”

“... touch of Sunset Boulevard about Lamarr’s later life. After she was caught shoplifting, her son, Tony Loder, testified that ‘she was worried because she was not as beautiful as she once was.’ Loder and his sister, Denise, were the product of one of her six marriages, all of which ended in divorce (three fewer than Zsa Zsa Gabor, her near ...”

“... decades since Moss was photographed by Corinne Day for the Face, those instantly iconic black and white images of a skinny 16-year-old on Camber Sands, wearing no make-up and very few clothes, grinning through her freckles and pointy teeth, all at once so English, so ordinary and so glamorous. And it’s four decades since David Bowie – wearing a lot of ...”

“... feature of the ‘American exceptionalism’ celebrated in the introduction. He identifies white supremacy as another constitutive feature of the United States, one that became ever more pervasive after the Emancipation Proclamation, and one which, according to Evans, white Americans have had more difficulty coming ...”

“... to Johannesburg, where he set up a computer business in 1994. His brothers, Ajay and Rajesh ‘Tony’ Gupta, soon joined him, encouraged by the business-friendly policies of the new ANC government. The Guptas cultivated connections with ANC politicians and invested in media, infrastructure, cable television, and coal and uranium mining. Rajesh, the ...”

“... worked but would destroy him if it went wrong; then by secretly recording his conversations in the White House in the hope of storing up material to use against his opponents but in fact only providing evidence of his own malfeasance. Nixon belongs to a type well known in horse-racing, who would actually prefer to win a race by crooked means. He was, in that ...”

“... and the insidious cult of “breaking the rules”’. In the introduction to his second volume, White Heat, Sandbrook assures his readers that he has tried to avoid ‘the predictable and tiresome ritual’ of either demonising or romanticising the 1960s. This implies that he doesn’t have an argument, which is far from the case. But however partial they ...”

“... across the window (the parmo is Middlesbrough’s kebab: deep-fried flattened chicken topped with white sauce and cheese; in a variation called a hot shot parmo the whole thing is treated like a pizza base and pepperoni goes on top); bars and restaurants, including a busy branch of Akbar’s, the Bradford curry house, which flew slim red flags from its ...”

“... When Ehud Olmert and George W. Bush met at the White House in June, they concluded that Hamas’s violent ousting of Fatah from Gaza – which brought down the Palestinian national unity government brokered by the Saudis in Mecca in March – had presented the world with a new ‘window of opportunity’.* (Never has a failed peace process enjoyed so many windows of opportunity ...”