“... which many of the people we think of as black do not, and some of the people we think of as white do. So, too, the relevant genetic information about a person is individual and familial, not racial. A person’s height, for example is determined mainly by the height of his or her actual ancestors, partly by environmental factors and not at all by the ...”

“... sais quoi’ with ‘tra-la-la’.Diski’s thoughts are in part a response to an earlier work by Richard Scholar, The Je Ne Sais Quoi in Early Modern Europe, and she’s the first person he talks about on the acknowledgments page of his new book. ‘Her piece brilliantly demonstrated,’ he writes, ‘in a way I could not have imagined, that the ...”

“... that women thought clean-shaven men were ‘incomplete’. He was in the habit of carrying a large white bone – it was, he claimed, a Tahitian club, invaluable for beating off anyone who sought to molest him. He rode round town on a white pony, painted sometimes with purple and black spots, sometimes purple all ...”

“... of poor black Jamaicans burned down the Morant Bay courthouse and killed 18 people, most of them white and one the local chief magistrate, who had just had them fired on by soldiers after a reading of the Riot Act. The governor of the island, Edward Eyre, on the advice of his military commander and his law officers, decreed martial law in the county where ...”

“... It might mean using race as a tiebreaker, giving the nod to a candidate of colour over a white candidate who is similarly accomplished. It might mean selecting a candidate of colour over a white candidate who is considerably better qualified according to established criteria. The litigation involving Harvard ...”

“... early morning. The heroic little animal lay on the ground, with his big furry ears, and his clean white teeth, and his jolly cheerful little body, but his brave life was gone. It made me think how brave all these living things are. Here little coyote was, without any clothes or house or books or anything, with nothing but his own naked self to pay his way ...”

“... Sixth than Fifth Avenue, and you enter from either 53rd or 54th Street into a lobby, paced with white columns, that cuts all the way through the block. (The fitting into the city is graceful, and throughout the museum Taniguchi provides unexpected glimpses of nearby buildings.) You then turn to mount a grand stairway where you are greeted, on the first ...”

“... fixed up, nobody likes it any more. Posited as a symbol of the Revolution’s uniting of black and white, rich and poor, rumba is still performed almost exclusively by dark-skinned Cubans. As for the audience, ‘officials, white-collar workers, and light-skinned Cubans ... exit quickly and politely when they arc coerced to ...”

“... is defined as ‘the desire of satisfying a voracious appetite with a certain quantity of delicate white human flesh’. Not all of the ‘gems’ concern table manners; that’s just one of eleven chapters. Other subjects covered include letter-writing: ‘use as few parentheses as possible,’ Emily Thorwell wrote (in The Lady’s Guide to Complete ...”

“... Paul Strand would have envied; her parachute packer at HMS Heron had the kind of élan that Richard Avedon would strive for a decade later in his fashion spreads. She covered the home front for Vogue, and then, though she had lived in London for many years, her American passport allowed her to become one of only four female photojournalists accredited ...”

“... a moment or two to realise that they were moving at all – was as far from the blurred black and white videos produced in the 1960s and 1970s as Fox Talbot’s earliest photographs are from the detailed prints made by the likes of Beato a few decades later.The work exhibited in Video Acts: Single Channel Works from the Collections of Pamela and ...”

“... beard care and curated playlists. As with the Beatles album sleeves designed by Peter Blake and Richard Hamilton, this was where art and pop first locked eyes, before deciding to move in together.Ahalf-century​ on from the band’s messy divorce, you don’t have to go searching for Beatles bumpf: it’s everywhere. They’re as much a part of the public ...”

“... I heard that the family of an American soldier killed in Iraq receives $12,000. I heard that the White House had deleted the chapter on Iraq from the annual Economic Report of the President, on the grounds that it did not conform with an otherwise cheerful tone. Within a week in January I heard Condoleezza Rice say there were 120,000 Iraqi troops trained to ...”

“... rights movement in which her father, Ralph Allen, played an important role. He was one of two white college students who joined 38 Black activists in a voting rights campaign. The Baptist church where they met to read scripture and sing spirituals was invaded by law enforcement officers, resulting in arrests, imprisonment and, ultimately, the burning down ...”

“... be revealed, alludes directly and by anagram to the authors of The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail: Richard Leigh and Michael Baigent, who recently sued Brown’s publisher for plagiarism and lost. The third author, Henry Lincoln, didn’t sue. The book itself is mentioned in large capitals, and Teabing comments on it pedantically (‘their fundamental premise ...”