“... adviser David Young as minister without portfolio in 1984, but the Labour administrations of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown made much more use of the practice of outside appointments, with Brown appointing Peter Mandelson in 2008 as secretary of state for business and then in 2009 as ‘first secretary of state’, a title that was chosen instead of deputy ...”

“... unable to spot the cop in their midst. True Romance, Tarantino’s first script, directed by Tony Scott and released in 1993, has a big drug deal that ends in a massacre because too many people show up at the party. There is a marvellous three-way stand-off here – drug-buyer’s bodyguards against cops against Mafia – which is repeated in Reservoir ...”

“... Punk rockers looked ugly, partly because, being ill-favoured, gangly and for the most part poor-white geeks, they were to the manner born, and partly because they wanted to. They sounded ugly, partly because not many could play their instruments very well, partly because they were out of their heads most of the time, but mostly because they wanted to. The ...”

“... chiefly in the cause of social control and illegal violence. In effecting this rupture of morale, Tony Blair had an importance second only to Cheney. After 2001, Blair’s words carried a weight with respectable opinion in the US unrivalled by any American politician. His demeanour lent to the campaign for war a presumption of humility that Cheney could never ...”

“... movement visualised its anger, the demands and the diversity of its members. The purple, green and white of the suffragette colours formed a new revolutionary tricolour, and the WSPU and the suffragettes, the union’s militant element, patterned themselves on the radical Enlightenment. Led by the artist Jacques-Louis David, the Jacobins adapted Catholic ...”

“... indefatigable zeal.’ A century later, little has changed. ‘They’re all engineers, mostly white males, mostly from the South,’ one former ExxonMobil board member told Coll. ‘They shared a belief in the One Right Answer, that you would solve the equation and that would be the answer, and it didn’t need to be debated.’ The attitude gained them ...”

“... which classical motifs – a cherub here, a maiden there – are delicately picked out in crisp white relief. Jasper was an unglazed white stoneware that could be stained with mineral oxides, producing its distinctive colours: alongside various shades of blue, there was sage green, lilac and chocolate brown, all as ...”

“... War”’.Kowol takes issue with that claim. He begins not with a politician but with John Baker White, a reserve officer in the London Rifle Brigade before the war and then a serving officer. Baker White kept a journal, a curious but fascinating document which was published in 1942 as A Soldier Dares to Think. He was ...”

“... a fire was in my head, And cut and peeled a hazel wand, And hooked a berry to a thread; And when white moths were on the wing, And moth-like stars were flickering out, I dropped the berry in a stream And caught a little silver trout. If the trout is a poem, the wand is knowledge of the land and people: it’s beautiful and apparently artlessly simple, but ...”

“... whoop down the avenue. The people who stopped put both hands on the Ferragamo window and the white light made each one a little blonder. One woman said ‘beautiful’; the glass misted up in front of her mouth. I walked on a few blocks. There was a midnight service going on at St Patrick’s Cathedral. A long queue stretched all the way down to the ...”

“... to their conclusion. But really after the 1969 Hyde Park Free Concert (Mick’s rather desirable white frock and all those hypocritical butterflies for the newly dead unlamented Brian), Richards’s reiterative narrative of Stones songs, gigs and internal warfare in Life was all news to me, and not all of it riveting. I see that this makes me an unlikely ...”

“... sovereignty, free will, moral truth, reason – as exclusivist and self-serving creations of white, heterosexual bourgeois males. In the regime of deindustrialisation and globalised financial capitalism that followed the oil crisis of 1973, man would be increasingly deprived of his work ethic (and self-worth) and burdened by unprecedented professional ...”

“... to lie on their stomachs. Their arms were tied behind their backs. For a few minutes, a group of white-coated surgeons huddled around them. The stadium was quiet but for a low murmur of conversation and the cries of the hawkers. Once a hand and a foot had been cut from each of the men tied up on the grass, the white coats ...”

“... in a sea battle off Flamborough Head in Yorkshire and that it still lay somewhere near the white chalk cliffs. In recent decades, both the US and French navies have tried to locate it, but there are hundreds of wrecks off that craggy coast and they failed to find anything that could be definitively identified. Then, in 2018, a company called Merlin ...”

“... Moore, a black man convicted, along with an accomplice, of the rape and murder of a 23-year-old white convenience store clerk. He is awaiting execution. Bright planned to argue, first, that under the terms of the 14th Amendment a black man is not ‘equally protected’ in a Georgia courtroom which, like all the others in the state, displays the Confederate ...”