“... colours, a sure sign that Jamaica’s ‘pigmentocracy’ was alive and well. The ‘not quite white’ Browns gathered on their verandas to drink rum punch, served by their Black servants (soon to be renamed ‘helpers’); they looked to Britain and wondered anxiously what was to come. Six decades later the island feels very different. Marley and Manley ...”

“... He dresses better than any of us, I think, and is daintily polite. Negroes are deemed as good as white people, in Venice, and so this man feels no desire to go back to his native land. His judgment is correct.Twain had grown up around Black people in Missouri, a slave state, and thought he had their measure. His father was a lawyer who bought and sold ...”

“... tell you his story,not tapping into memory but into time,and refire the first salvo for the endof white hegemony in Central Africa.You must come along. Whether you’re aCaribbean in Brixton able to instruct me,or white middle class in Surrey,or an elderly person on welfare in Consett,or a blurty-eyed young person,whether ...”

“... order, colour, and occasionally the wording’ – so says David Bindman in his introduction to William Blake: The Complete Illuminated Books (Thames and Hudson, 480 pp., £39.95, 30 October, 0 500 51014 8). Obviously not many such books could be printed, which accounts for their extreme rarity, but Blake thought his method greatly preferable to the one ...”

“... do harsh things when attacking a barbaric enemy guilty of the ultimate ‘sacrilege’: killing white children. What looked like ruthlessness was ‘vision’ – as savage Africa was bound to fall to civilised powers, Rhodes was right to urge that it would benefit not just the settlers but Africans to make as much of it British as possible. Even Schreiner ...”

“... that good.’ It’s an effortful business, and, it seems, a full-time job, but hardly unusual in William Gibson’s futuristic fiction, which often features characters whose sensitivity to ambient data borders on the supernaturally acute. His last but one, Idoru (1996), introduced Colin Laney, an ‘intuitive fisher of patterns of information . . . the ...”

“... William Golding’s Rites of Passage, which appeared seven years ago, purported to be an account, by a young toff, good-natured but still wet behind the ears, of a voyage to Australia, around 1814, in a clapped-out English warship reduced to carrying emigrants. Keeping a journal for the amusement of his noble patron, he tells of a comical amorous adventure with an emigrant female, a patronising friendship with an ex-lower-deck first lieutenant (‘allow me to congratulate you on imitating to perfection the manners and speech of a somewhat higher station in life than you were born to’), and various puppyish acts of indiscipline and breaches of Naval etiquette which set him at odds with the captain ...”

“... source. My bias, which I will attempt to overcome, tends towards the more cynical view ascribed to William Burroughs by Jack Kerouac. ‘When you start separating the people from their rivers what have you got? Bureaucracy!’ Having triumphantly ghosted London’s autobiography, Ackroyd’s obvious follow-up was the Thames: generator of life, origin of the ...”

“... William Spencer Cavendish, sixth Duke of Devonshire, was born ‘in a somewhat furtive manner for a baby of his exalted rank’. In 1790 his father, the fifth Duke, and his mother, the giddy Duchess Georgiana, had been travelling in the Low Countries, where the Austrian threat became such that they bolted for the safety of Revolutionary Paris ...”

“... of the planet’s history. And something in common, too, with the myth-making in Rousseau or William Morris that offers visions of hope or disaster for mankind. The myth-making here seems, by comparison, unpersuasive – being vague on the lost values of the past (‘voluntary submission to the great Whole’) and both vague and cranky on the continuing ...”

“... St Francis, and so on. Stereotyping is particularly evident in the case of religious apparitions. William Christian, an anthropologist turned historian, has been studying apparitions in Late Medieval Spain. St Ildefonso, St Anthony of Padua and St Michael the Archangel all made their appearance, but the dominant figure was that of the Virgin Mary. At Jaen in ...”

“... according to the 1790 Naturalisation Act, they did not qualify because they weren’t ‘free white persons’. Despite this, their petition was granted by a court clerk who knew them well. They settled in Wilkesboro, North Carolina, at the foot of the Blue Ridge Mountains, where they had a large and comfortable house built, chose a surname – Bunker ...”

“... Harbour. The sea here was calm, the low-lying land, dotted with pastel-coloured houses with white roofs, slipped past easily. We passed a couple of rusty old buoys used to tether warships in World War Two; these days common terns nest there to escape the rats that live on shore. Then we travelled through St George’s Channel between Paget Island and ...”

“... which Reagan invariably signed off on. I was later told that the process was known inside the White House as the ‘Goldilocks option’. He was also bored by complicated intelligence estimates. Forever courteous and gracious, he would doodle during national security briefings or simply not listen. It would have been natural to turn instead to the ...”

“... It is partly because so much appears to be known about William Cobbett (1763-1835) that he is insufficiently understood. Few political writers anywhere and at any time have been more prolific or had more impact on their contemporaries. His newspaper The Political Register, which appeared at intervals between 1802 and 1835, sold at its peak of popularity up to 70,000 copies an issue and was read by millions on both sides of the Atlantic ...”