“... or underdrawn his characters, McCourt’s books and manner are engaging. The historian Richard White describes his book as an ‘anti-memoir’. White, who teaches history at Stanford, has traced the story of another post-Independence immigrant – his mother. Sarah Walsh emigrated to the United States from County Kerry ...”

“... between the end of Reconstruction and the 1960s, often for such crimes as daring to look at a white woman. Black bodies no longer swing in the Southern breeze, as Billie Holiday sang. Instead, they are victims of chokeholds, bullets and other ‘restraining’ measures inflicted by the police, and not only below the Mason-Dixon line. Police killings of ...”

“... Nowhere such unanimity.When I started reading her, the book was still The Complete Poems of 1969, white and yellow and blue, like a Ukrainian flag and tonic. A subsequent printing of it contained all four – just four – of her books: North & South (1946), A Cold Spring (1955), Questions of Travel (1965) and Geography III (1976). Each book was ...”

“... up. I wonder if the citizens of Baghdad ever feel that way. The day before the first shooting, the White House Press Secretary, Ari Fleischer, proposed a ‘one-bullet’ scenario for getting rid of Saddam Hussein. In Washington, one bullet was too many. This was the sniper’s time, and his alone. Only he had anything to show for it. And part of what he had ...”

“... treatment (as the European Court of Human Rights decided in the case of the RUC’s use of white noise against IRA prisoners in the 1970s). In both cases it’s forbidden under international law. In the last year or so a movement to ban this practice has attracted the support of a number of artists whose work has been on the interrogation ...”

“... In Arthur Schlesinger’s court history, A Thousand Days: John F. Kennedy in the White House, which might without unfairness be called the founding breviary of the cult of JFK, there appears the following vignette. Schlesinger had been asked to carpenter a ‘White Paper’ justifying Washington’s destabilisation of Cuba, in which the high-flown rhetoric of the New Frontier might form a sort of scab over the fouler business of empire ...”

“... Celebration was concerned, modern ended in the 1930s. The future as defined by the brochure from Michael Eisner’s Disney Corporation was to be found not in Walt’s skyscrapers and monorails, but in a long-lost past of white picket fences and pastel dormer windows, so lost that perhaps it was entirely mythic: There was ...”

“... Michael Frayn hasn’t published a novel for 16 years, but it’s immediately clear from his new one that he hasn’t lost the trick of it. After so long a lay-off some self-consciousness might have been expected, but Frayn has turned this potential liability to advantage by making it an essential part of his subject ...”

“... They were waiting to catch a bus near the Well Hall Roundabout in Eltham, South London. A group of white youths ran across the road without warning. Stephen Lawrence was stabbed twice. Duwayne Brooks heard the remark ‘What? What? Nigger!’ as the youths approached. From here on, there is no consensus; everything is subject to ...”

“... of the social influence of ‘good bad books’, he probably saw that Mackenzie’s heroes – the Michael Fanes and John Ogilvies – lacked a true personality linking them to their author, and at the same time lacked the constructed persona with which writers like John Buchan managed to endow themselves and their characters. The sense of disembodied ...”

“... of the story, it is likely that if Sappho ever did refer in her songs to leaping off the White Rocks of Leukas, she meant the phrase in a non-literal way, perhaps as a metaphor for falling into a swoon. Eventually, it may be that later writers interpreted the phrase (if indeed she used it) as referring to a literal leap, thus giving rise to the ...”

“... than the ups and downs of his personal life, however, Tunde is preoccupied with the symptoms of white supremacy and colonialism he perceives around him: in museums and in articles; in AI-generated images (‘in thirty minutes of clicking he has landed on not a single Black face’); in a serial killer’s ability to evade capture for years (‘his victims ...”

“... collection of poems by Cortney Lamar Charleston (Haymarket, £12), describes growing up Black in white suburbia. In ‘Hip-Hop Introspective’:Kids ask what FUBU means. White girls look at meconstantly. DMX never seems to be screaming.The underground heads north on my playlistswhile an old poster peels away from the ...”

“... at the city’s northern edge, stands a row of other remnants from that era: battered off-white hulks like a mouthful of decayed, cigar-stained teeth. We recognise them from photographs taken in the 1950s, usually showing men in white tropical suits or mambo dancers or gangsters or gamblers. Or we remember them from ...”

“... aged 78, Kinglake in 1891, aged 82) but play very different roles in the 20th-century imagination. Michael Collie, the more severe of Borrow’s new biographers, notes the instructions Borrow’s publisher gave him when he was writing The Bible in Spain: he was told to report his remarkable achievements, experiences and skills ‘in a natural manner, as if ...”