“... and Charlie were driving £2,631,684 in mail bags to Leather-slade Farm on 8 August 1963, with Tony Bennett singing ‘The Good Life’ on the radio. When Buster Edwards hanged himself last year and I rang Bruce Reynolds for a comment (an explanation, if there can ever be such a thing) he referred me to Alvarez and The Savage God. Reynolds was always the ...”

“... of the Thirties. Why has the Opposition done so badly? Two recent books afford a clue.* Tony Benn’s diaries are full of interest, in many ways the more so because we already have such plentiful diaristic accounts of the 1964-70 Labour Government. (Benn reveals, incidentally, that Harold Wilson promised that he would publish posthumously the real ...”

“... Margaret Thatcher, was kept for a version of Britain in which the natural condition was to be white and born here, in which the unemployed were scroungers and the rich (or some of them) were heroes, where single mothers were letting the side down and ‘political correctness’ was a threat to the life expectancy of your children. Britain became nastier ...”

“... appearing as a peevish young icon slouched on a chair with a moody, come-hither expression, a pure white cat on his lap and his bare feet submerged in the pile of a white rug in Mr and Mrs Clark and Percy, the portrait by David Hockney that aspired to Gainsborough as a take on the aristocracy of London, c.1971, but owed more ...”

“... past. For the first time in more than a year there was no danger of suicide car bombs. A blue and white police vehicle hooted at a small child kicking a ball. Children often play in the alleyway behind the hotel – their favourite game, played with plastic Kalashnikovs, is Americans v. the resistance – but it had been a long time since I had seen any of ...”

“... Prince Bandar claimed his share of the $86 billion deal with BAE Systems, a commission approved by Tony Blair and his attorney general. Few imagine that the investigation will lead anywhere, since US and other European companies do similar deals all the time. The mandarins in the Defence Ministry in Whitehall refuse to be bothered by the fuss, and the cuddly ...”

“... being made, adapted from a memoir he would never complete, to be called ‘The Return of the Thin White Duke’. This dubious pseudonymous character was first aired in an interview with Rolling Stone’s bumptious but canny young reporter Cameron Crowe; it soon became notorious. Crowe’s scene-setting picture of Bowie at home featured black candles and ...”

“... been guarded. Hizbullah has launched missiles into northern Israel, and Israeli forces have fired white phosphorus shells and dropped bombs on towns close to the border, displacing tens of thousands of people from their homes on both sides. On 8 January the senior Hizbullah commander Wissam al-Tawil was assassinated in an Israeli airstrike. But on the whole ...”

“... for some while now to admit to being bored by the huge, flat, ‘pure’ abstracts on the white walls of the museums of modern art. And yet non-representational paintings on a fairly large scale seem still to be what art students are most encouraged to make. Critics now incline to applaud in them evidence of a strenously physical relationship with ...”

“... it in his diary: I saw Cyril Connolly talking to an elderly, refined-looking man wearing a white Stetson hat and white bandana tied about his neck, and, excited, I went to Connolly to tell him some gossip that I had had from Stephen which I assumed would impress him for my being close enough to Stephen that he would ...”

“... and economic order that denies them the means to live satisfactory lives. Angry or frightened white men are turning on anyone they can – women, immigrants and foreigners – in an attempt to retrieve some sense of superiority. Angry or frightened white women, many of whom have no interest in a feminism preoccupied ...”

“... her own money (which the Littlewoods managed), she sold the film rights to John Osborne and Tony Richardson’s production company for the very substantial sum of £20,000 (the equivalent of around half a million pounds today).In September 1960 Richardson directed a production of A Taste of Honey in Los Angeles; in October it transferred to ...”

“... the first morning had a giddy, almost nervous energy. It was overwhelmingly, if not exclusively, white. The biggest constituency, men in jeans and T-shirts, wouldn’t have looked out of place at one of the rock concerts advertised on the NEC’s hoardings.Inside the main hall, the queue for the bar was already twenty people deep at 10.30 a.m. Senior ...”

“... renting, not selling, their houses (building societies have anyway stopped extending mortgages). White Zimbabweans talk almost exclusively about the economic facts of life and how mad they are – the politics have been mad for quite a while. Ian Smith was invited to give a seminar at the University of Zimbabwe not long ago and was greeted as a hero by an ...”

“... Levin was found strangled in Central Park in New York City on an August morning in 1986. She was white, pretty, 18, and she travelled in the wealthy circle of New York’s private-school set. Her murderer, who had secretly watched the police collect the body from across the street, confessed a few hours later. He was Robert Chambers, 19, another member of ...”