“... and Slobodian say.Bannon likes Wolf, Klein thinks, because she brings in the ‘pissed-off, mostly white suburban moms … genuinely worried about the well-being of their kids and … done being dismissed and mocked as “Karens” by mean liberals’. She helps them feel okay about swerving rightwards and she chucks them loads of nonsense for them to get ...”

“... them, are facts of life, that to Clinton the mere act of reprocessing was unacceptable. As the White House contemplated a call-up of reservists and the evacuation of Americans from South Korea, there was panic buying in Seoul, where the stock market fell by 25 per cent. The situation was defused by a brilliant and near-treasonous intervention by Jimmy ...”

“... between 2012 and 2014. The main character, however, is a retired classics professor called Richard, a widower from the former East Berlin whose wife drank herself to death for reasons he doesn’t like to think about. Among other things, Richard is a lightning conductor for the worries a ...”

“... except that Queen Elizabeth has borne five children, the extra one being the second-born Prince Richard, Duke of Sussex. Now that he has grown up, who of his three differently-unsuitable ladies will Richard marry? The aristocrat with the mad mother, the American who takes drugs or the black one? Unlike the Prince of ...”

“... and diplomats have been more indulgent, though not everyone shares the glorious certainty of Sir Richard Evans, British Ambassador in Beijing from 1984 to 1988. He concludes that for most Chinese the Beijing massacre is a ‘blemish’ on a record that is ‘much more white than black’. Western governments were obliged ...”

“... she inveighs against a Korean-American psychotherapist who rejects her as a patient, praises Richard Pryor, investigates the rape and murder of the artist Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, considers Black-Asian relations and reflects on her immigrant family’s stereotypical embourgeoisement. Better known as a poet (she teaches at Rutgers), here she uses prose to ...”

“... like trying to make this film.’ Getting to work on the film, wresting it from the hands of the white director Norman Jewison, persuading Warner Brothers that it needed to be as long as it is, that the scenes of Malcolm’s pilgrimage to Egypt and Mecca had to be shot on location, all this is a version of Malcolm’s struggle on behalf of the blacks; maybe ...”

“... in the land of Catita, where Jackanapes flies with his tail in his mouth, to seek out a lady as white as snow and as red as blood?’ Jack is dead. The character who speaks to Eumenides here, and asks to be taken into his service, is the grateful ghost of a poor man for whose burial Eumenides, although a stranger and mere passer-by, had earlier and ...”

“... and poor at sums. He gives the age of Olivier, born in 1907, as 39 when he achieved his triumph as Richard III in 1944. Tarquin Olivier, born in 1936, is credited with a visit at the age of seven to Notley Abbey, bought by his father in 1945. Nor has Holden checked all the stories he takes over from previous biographers. Like most of them, he tells how Olivier ...”

“... a distemper which may be removed with water, as he afterwards confessed in the Times. The anchored white liner counted for more in his eyes than did the cycloramic unity of the series, which the unmasking of the ‘Riva degli Schiavoni’ would restore. I cannot help liking better than buggery the ‘Switch-Hitter’ which Peter gave to the English language ...”

“... response to Hurricane Katrina. But that hasn’t stopped the press having a field day with it. The White House press corps is scandalised at not having been informed, as if it were somehow the business of politicians to ring the papers up every time they do something wrong (‘Hello? Is that Carl Bernstein? Richard Nixon ...”

“... dreaming of ice, then we spotted this little German peasant woman ambling towards us with a very white face. My mate Fergus sniggered. He said she had funny wee shoes and legs. I have a feeling she may not remember how the conversation went, but I recorded it for posterity in the back of a school jotter the next day. The Queen: ‘Very hot, isn’t ...”

“... In the week beginning 7 September, a member of the White House security staff – who else could it have been? – sent Matt Drudge, cyber muckraker, a CCTV clip, ‘on condition that its origin and owner not be disclosed’. The tape showed the President returning from his morning jog in August 1993 accompanied by a troupe of bodyguards and young staffers ...”

“... in reductio ad Hitlerum as he bears witness to what’s going on in the megachurches: viewers of Richard Dawkins’s documentary The Root of All Evil? might remember his opening salvo against a pre-scandal Ted Haggard, in which Dawkins said that a New Life Church service reminded him of the Nuremberg rallies. (Haggard eventually chased Dawkins out of the ...”

“... In the evenings, after dinner in hall, groups would take shape informally in the quad. There was Richard Cobb’s lot, making for the buttery and another round of worldly banter. There was this or that sodality, taking a cigarette break or killing time before revision. There was my own cohort, usually divided between the opposing tasks of selling the ...”