“... of those years whom Maraniss has traced, and an unnamed third in his first year in Chicago, were white, and so were many of his friends. Obama’s memoir Dreams from My Father condensed several partners into one, and offered a scene of mutual alienation between the hero and his girlfriend over divided reactions to a play about black Americans. Here, Maraniss ...”

“... Adams and his son John Quincy. Conversely, 24 years after Andrew Jackson of Tennessee left the White House in 1837, the next generation of Southerners led 11 states out of the Union, founding a Southern Confederacy to preserve the institution of slavery from the meddling of Abraham Lincoln. As a result, the United States was temporarily dissolved, and the ...”

“... a self-disciplined and abstemious diner with an enthusiasm, years ahead of his time, for light white wines and salad. (His headquarters in Utrecht now house a passable restaurant.) This influential tract, which remained in circulation as late as the mid-17th century owing to its perceived application to the doings of subsequent favourites (as Perry’s ...”

“... a layer of enigmatic stardust over films I wouldn’t otherwise have been interested in, such as Michael Winner’s Lawman or the Danny La Rue vehicle Our Miss Fred – or, indeed, David Essex’s Stardust. These films were out of reach, but only just out of reach. Forbidden fruit hanging almost low enough to be plucked.I knew that I wanted to read Offbeat ...”

“... for postage stamps. Here, again, impeccably jacketed in black with red swastika’d armband on white ground, is Albert Speer’s Inside the Third Reich: The Definitive Account of Nazi Germany by Hitler’s Armaments Minister. After a few minutes spent considering this Berlin Wall of travellers’ dulce et utile, one would hardly be surprised to find a ...”

“... details about the national struggle against rule from London. But the fact that the majority of white troops in British India were for a long time Irish, as were a fair number of the Empire’s administrators, adventurers and traders, is usually – and wrongly – left out of the story. The Scottish response to lost Empire, too, is often a calculated ...”

“... at Bucharest.’ There are jokey texts like ‘the Pasha whose balls looked like four milk-white horses’, and inventions in the style of Lewis Carroll: ‘She getting laden with gvalk and fromck and painful interest’. Usually, however, they mean nothing at all. Purely cryptographic pages not only cancel the meaning of the Mallock original but seem ...”

“... verb, and occupiers defied the restrictive policing that normally kept city centre areas clean for white-collar workers and tourists. Inside the space, people made decisions on a directly democratic basis, gathering in general assemblies where consensus was supposed to substitute for majority rule, and demands to existing authorities were explicitly ...”

“... perhaps Blake used the copper plate as a sketchpad, as Peter Ackroyd suggests in his biography. Michael Phillips’s replicas of the original plates testify to the artist’s industry and also to the devotion of modern Blakeans. The lay observer can hardly bear to contemplate the toil involved in all that neat, packed engraving, let alone in having to do ...”

“... a third time. Trump was going to win Florida, despite the millions of dollars spent there by Michael Bloomberg, and he was storming ahead of his 2016 numbers in Ohio. The other swing states were closer, but they seemed to be moving his way. On CNN I registered the same dramatic shift in mood. A couple of talking heads looked to be on the verge of ...”

“... the police. It’s a mini-masterpiece of modern horror. Cavalcanti, a Brazilian who had joined Michael Balcon’s Ealing Studios in 1940, also directed the Christmas party episode; he was best known for his propaganda film Went the Day Well? (1942). In the role of Frere, Michael Redgrave, who in 1942 had been medically ...”

“... the unsolved mysteries of the war. They say that Argentine defenders fought back fiercely until a white flag suddenly appeared from an enemy position. One of the subalterns of D Company of the Second Para moved forward to accept the surrender. He was instantly shot dead. Hastings and Jenkins say that it was almost certainly a mishap in the fog of war, rather ...”

“... pledge allegiance to it. It is also a ubiquitous presence in the American landscape. The Red, White and Blue waves from people’s porches, flies over car dealerships and gas stations and adorns flower-pots; cars are festooned with it in the form of bumper stickers, window decals and antenna pennants. The flag decorates the altars of churches of every ...”

“... went one better and procured the body, according to Macintyre, of a down and out Welshman, Glyndwr Michael, a 34-year-old vagrant found dead in January 1943 in an abandoned warehouse. Michael had either intentionally or mistakenly drunk a concoction called Battle’s Vermin Killer, which contained ...”

“... suicide of his wife, which apparently was the result of an affair he had been conducting. In 1993, Michael Mates left the government after disclosures that he had sent gifts and messages of support to the businessman Asil Nadir. Norman Lamont caused an uproar over his use of public money to evict a tenant from his property. Other lesser Tories, such as Mrs ...”