“... 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 ...”

“... pledge allegiance to it. It is also a ubiquitous presence in the American landscape. The Red, White and Blue waves from people’s porches, flies over car dealerships and gas stations and adorns flower-pots; cars are festooned with it in the form of bumper stickers, window decals and antenna pennants. The flag decorates the altars of churches of every ...”

“... quite a lot of money (you could call it pots) –    but an interloper, hale and hearty, with a white female 160 to 180 pound carcass, interloped, and snatched her $2,500 carnelian earrings from Neiman-Marcus. For ten years, Police say, she’s been at it;    she’s very manly looking – by no account is she a beauty – if she has anything to do with ...”

“... She stirs up ghosts and has no hand in laying them to rest. The centre wall of samplers deploys white figures cut from black paper: the subjects are all absences. This frieze, The Sovereign Citizens’ Sesquicentennial Civil War Celebration, brings the story from the plantation into the present, even though the cast of characters look unchangingly ...”

“... panniers and stomachers. Frankland’s watercolour for 1793 captured the vogue for long folds of white fabric and a body beneath that was clearly no longer tightly corseted.In The Age of Undress, Amelia Rauser examines the fashion that burned brightly, if briefly, at the end of the 18th century. The trend was highly revealing. Breasts had already been on ...”

“... that repetition.’ ‘Really?’ I say trying to hear what they are saying through the din of ‘white trash, white trash’ that their smiles imply. In my head is the cosy paranoia of an Irish sitting-room: Fifties curtains with an urn full of flowers woven into the net, Sixties leaves scattered over the carpet, wallpaper ...”

“... the Puritans who settled colonial New England offers a succinct and not inaccurate summary of white-Indian relations in the United States. Despite the twists and turns of official policy – from Thomas Jefferson’s efforts to assimilate Indians by teaching them to farm (even though they had been doing so for centuries), to Andrew Jackson’s Indian ...”

“... the sex obsession that lay clotted on Ann Veronica and The New Machiavelli like cold white sauce was merely old maid’s mania, the reaction towards the flesh of a mind too long absorbed in airships and colloids.’ No man of Wells’s temperament could resist such baiting, with the result that he and Rebecca West became lovers. Their ...”

“... partly a matter of form. Like Diane Arbus and Robert Mapplethorpe, Hujar created square, black and white images, typically using a Rolleiflex or the more sophisticated Hasselblad, plus tripod. The geometry of the square encourages a photographer to centre the subject and face it head on, turning unruly bodies and irregular scenes into fixed primary shapes. But ...”

“... among ‘members unlimited’. The loyalist reaction against this popular agitation was severe. William Pitt the Younger’s government legislated against ‘seditious’ meetings and writings, and imprisoned leaders of reform societies and printers of the radical press. ‘Church and King’ was the watchword of magistrates and manufacturers, who employed ...”

“... in New York an audience is either young or old (in the Lincoln Center, mainly old), black or white (in the Lincoln Center, almost exclusively white), gay or straight (in the Lincoln Center it is often hard to tell). The audience for James Baldwin that evening could not be so easily categorised: it was, I suppose, half ...”

“... the fatal heart attack of his youngest brother, Robertson – of his ‘ideal Elder brother’, William. William died at his summer home in Chocorua, New Hampshire with Henry at his bedside. Only a week earlier Henry had arrived from England with William and his wife, Alice, along with ...”

“... with different motives informing each of them, and very different outcomes. For Britain’s white Australian subjects, colonialism represented a liberation, with most of them (this of course excludes transported felons) becoming far more individually free than their sisters and brothers back in Britain, and at least as free as those – a majority, as ...”

“... campaigner – or that he was Black.He was the son of an enslaved Jamaican woman and the white plantation owner who had raped her. After he left Jamaica as a young man, Wedderburn never returned for fear of being hanged: ‘such’, he wrote of the plantocracy, ‘is their hatred of anyone having black blood in his veins.’ No one tried to hang him ...”