“... he had not used it to alter the condition of the ball. ‘We have to be seen to be whiter than white,’ he explained. ‘Things have gone on in Test cricket – not England but other sides – and they have got away with it. But we have taken firm and prompt action. As far as I am concerned the matter is closed.’ The affair preoccupied the media for the ...”

“... bad, it’s a bit like flu, we will have a vaccine soon: stopping flights from China was enough. Tony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease, deftly cut across Trump at a White House press briefing. No, it isn’t only as bad as flu, it’s far more dangerous. Yes, public health ...”

“... to him. They were perhaps more perceptive than his other friends, even his loyal protector/lover Tony Gandarillas. Certainly they took him seriously as a painter. Ben Nicholson’s work during their association owed much to Wood. Yet the Nicholsons were as shocked as everyone else when, on 21 August 1930, Wood threw himself in front of a train at Salisbury ...”

“... than Rwanda had been because it was closer, there were more pictures, and the victims were white. Frustrated at the Serbian massacres of Bosnians in UN ‘safe havens’ and at Europe’s powerlessness to stop the madness, Nato found a cathartic release in air strikes. With the benefit of an ambiguously worded UN mandate, it bombed Serbian armour and ...”

“... themes and media and sites and forms of attention have been emulsified into a phenomenon on which Tony Blair smiles. Stallabrass follows the tracks of this social monster, which can be identified by what seems to be an infinitely elastic, numbing permissiveness, from mannikins of children with penises for noses and vulvae for mouths to used sanitary towels ...”

“... The name for them in Kenya, Wrong tells us, is ‘coconuts’: brown on the outside, but white inside. ‘The people John really wanted to impress were not the House of Mumbi, but the House of Windsor,’ a Kenyan journalist said to her. ‘His loyalty to Western values – things like a belief in the importance of rules, transparency, honesty and ...”

“... into my mind at lunchtime every day for the World at One. Reagan was long gone and Bush was in the White House. He didn’t send me any messages but he had the same initials as the General Belgrano. ‘GB’ was quite common on cars. The drivers would convey me to the president even though he was in Washington and I didn’t have a passport. I knew my ...”

“... feel about the placing of such an establishment in this location, has a magical quality … The white dome, which is the outer shell of the containment building that protects the reactor and its steam generator, is about 230 ft (70 metres) high and can be glimpsed from miles around. Pevsner, admirer of Gropius and risk-taker that he was, had no obvious ...”

“... a brick-lined oven ‘as ravaged as the surface of the moon’ to be blasted into charcoal, while Tony and Dave, nose-blind to the odour of steamed clams, sit around with tea and muffins waiting for the next delivery in the hydraulic lift. Tumours are apparently hardest to burn and glow like gold in the inferno. Outside, as mourners file from the chapel, the ...”

“... history is to deliver us from plausible historical analogies.’ What is specific to our age, as Tony Judt once observed, is that we have become extremely skilful at teaching the lessons of history, but quite bad at teaching actual history. The truth is that today’s threats to democracy don’t parallel 20th-century experiences. Fascism – as distinct ...”

“... this can be seen in D.A. Pennebaker’s film Dont Look Back, which records in unblinking black and white a two-week slice of Dylan’s British tour in the summer of 1965. Pennebaker was also present with his camera on the even crazier world tour of 1966, but his footage was hijacked by Dylan, who worked with another director, Howard Alk, to produce a seldom ...”

“... dictator, and blame him for Zimbabwe’s descent into hyperinflation and poverty. The seizure of white-owned farms by his black supporters has been depicted as a form of thuggery, and as a cause of the country’s declining production, as if these lands were doomed by black ownership. Sanctions have been imposed, and opposition groups funded with the ...”

“... vans. At that time, remembering pictures of jolly Wehrmacht soldiers wrenching down the red and white Polish border gates, I felt quite protective about frontiers. But then I read a Polish novel. An allegory contrived to lull the censor, it described a tiny sliver of land between Belgium and Germany which had been overlooked by the surveyors as they drew ...”

“... anorexia – which is neither here nor there but I may as well admit that too. And then I read The White Hotel by D.M. Thomas, an anti-Freudian Holocaust novel. My parents had it. I remember the passage on the letter scene in Eugene Onegin. (The heroine performs Tatiana.) I also remember the horrifying passage on Babi Yar, where the heroine dies, and where in ...”

“... Schadenfreude that led gay activists to say ‘You’re next’ is now greeted by – straight, white – cries of ‘Oh no we’re not.’ Oddly, the critics do not consider the possibility that the campaign itself may have contributed, in the old industrialised countries, to the slowness of the spread of Aids; or that its acceleration in the rest of the ...”