“... like a monster in an ancient story. All this blue and different blue and greens and acres of blown white, and the mysterious golds and silvers of the after-rain. Between the moon and the neutrinos, and bedevilled by both, is Ireland and the matter of Ireland and the matter with Ireland. Barry – or Kettle? – keeps up a droll thread of running commentary ...”

“... newly out of bandages: Arches of buildings, this building, frame a stream of windows framed in white brick. This building is fireproof; or else it isn’t: the furnishings first to go: no, the patients. Patients on Sundays walk in a small garden. Today some go out on a group pass. To stroll the streets and shop. So what else is new? The sky slowly/swiftly ...”

“... to be fed up with the Democrats’ inability to get bills through Congress.In What It Took to Win, Michael Kazin traces the history over the past two centuries of what he calls ‘the oldest mass party in the world’. Kazin has been engaged with Democratic politics since 1960, when, at the age of twelve, he sported a large campaign button for John ...”

“... Durrell in 1959. The formula, if one were to look to history for clues, seems fairly simple. Be white, male, fairly imposing in stature, and in possession of a large ship and obedient crew. Mysteriously circle the coast of a remote tropical island populated by savages who have never seen a white man before. Drop ...”

“... see this country as a testing-ground where the difficulties of assimilation associated with non-white immigration first occurred and where their solutions could be attempted. If mere passage of time were to be associated with increased inter-racial tolerance, Britain might be expected to have moved further along this path than other countries in Western ...”

“... favelas and using them for pornographic photo shoots and movies. He showed me two black and white photographs which had been downloaded from the internet. One was of an eight-year-old girl being raped; the other was of a baby less than a year old covered in semen. ‘This material is spreading like lightning over the web,’ he said, ‘but it’s ...”

“... among American opponents of jazz, in Nazi propaganda and, more recently, in the bible of the white supremacist militia movement, The Turner Diaries. These anti-semites were assigning to the imaginary Jew the position they themselves occupied. Jews such as Frank were vulnerable stand-ins for the forces of Northern capital invited into the defeated ...”

“... camped out in the street and gathered at the windows of the tall buildings lining the road. A white pick-up truck went by, full of armed young men in plain clothes. Some other youths leaning on a car called out: ‘Journalists, how are you doing?’ The first blast hit as we were walking past the entrance to the Embassy. A short time later, a second ...”

“... ostensibly outside its world. Selznick was uneasy about the story’s aptness to be read as a white parable of the essential goodness of the slave-owning South. The film tries its best to alleviate the tacit racism, banning the word ‘nigger’ and repressing direct mention of the Ku Klux Klan. Yet the real world would draw out the story’s latent ...”

“... things when they are not at home: ‘She saw their travels in terms of adverts and a long talcum-white beach with the tropical breeze tossing the palms and her hair; he saw it [sic] in terms of forbidden foods, frittered away time, and ghastly expenses.’ They’re made for each other in a way: locked in their own cheap myths and clichés. Philip does have ...”

“... and animals, and his amazing examples – dead fish in a market, an array of cheeses, an ocean of white cloths in a department store – made me feel that Zola was a great writer I hadn’t even started to read. The cheeses are an especially telling (or showing) instance. They appear in tandem with some women gossiping about a man released from prison. The ...”

“... By my count​ , of the 37 photographs of Michael Ovitz in this book there are 19 in which his mouth stays shut – while he’s smiling. That isn’t intended as a hostile remark. His mouth stayed closed when he smiled because he was concentrating. You may not have heard of him, but for maybe a decade and a half starting in the mid-1970s no one in the motion picture business was more focused than Michael Ovitz ...”

“... of Arabic,’ Ahmad says to the owner, grinning conspiratorially at us. ‘Speak Arabic with Pak Michael, go on! He speaks Arabic. Go on! With a beard like that in Yemen you’d perfume it; here you mothball it to get rid of the cockroaches!’ So much for the sacred beard, a sign of piety with the Prophet’s beard the exemplar. It is distinctively Arab ...”

“... deputy prime minister (Charles Dance) as part of a repeatedly thwarted scheme to depose the PM (Michael Gambon) – is so outraged by the abuse directed at the government by the leader of the opposition, at the disrespect being shown to his posse, that he rises from his seat and crosses the chamber, in heroic slow motion, through a forest of arms raised in ...”

“... by that rickety wood. I’d seen it before, in that frame, and I knew who it was: my grandfather Michael. I knew that’s who it was though I’d never met him. The grandfather was covered in dust and damp patches dried in. But that was him: he had the darkest eyes I’d ever seen. His hair was slick, combed up to a glistening ridge; the lips were thin, the ...”