“... sugar and snails and sex cults and the dead children of children’s book authors. She wrote about William Morris and Mariano Fortuny. She wrote about Cambridge, where she and her sister Margaret Drabble were educated in the 1950s, and about the landscape of Yorkshire, where they were raised. She wrote about the educational revolution of the 1960s and the ...”

“... one where a teenager makes a sandwich ... and the next thing you know it’s in a vitrine in a white gallery with intellectuals peering at it. Writing like this looks easy. Sauntering from subject to subject, transcribing your thoughts, taking your sentences wherever you fancy. And when things get a bit too stream-of-consciousness, ...”

“... to mass incarceration, have significantly lower incomes and higher unemployment rates than the white population, and for whom the healthcare system and the overwhelmingly segregated education system and housing market have never provided equitable care, opportunity or provision. As a result of these inequalities, they are being infected and killed at a ...”

“... Howard Hunt, a former CIA agent who was employed as a consultant on special activities at the White House. Evidence soon pointed to the other accomplice at the lookout, Gordon Liddy, legal counsel to CREEP. The situation was complicated, because in some respects the Nixon administration was investigating itself. The FBI was a division of the Justice ...”

“... gypsum alabaster and calcite or onyx alabaster. Calcite alabaster from Egypt, commonly a creamy white with more translucent golden bands, is sometimes petalled, fleecy or cloudy in pattern, and darker types can occasionally resemble toffee. Its watery origin – often as stalactites – must have been well known and probably contributed to the old idea that ...”

“... nation like our own should never order a missile without thinking about its antiquarian value. William Least Heat Moon (son of Heat Moon, which is Sioux for ‘the seventh month’, and younger brother of Little Heat Moon) stresses his red identity at the price of suppressing – almost – his legal patronym, ...”

“... the internet into literature: ‘All writing about the portal so far had a strong whiff of old white intellectuals being weird about the blues.’ Explaining a meme confines it to a dusty museum. We peer at it through smeared bifocals. This does not dissuade her. Something is being experienced for the first time. Somebody needs to record that feeling. In ...”

“... on 42nd Street, then one as a fashion editor at Harper’s Bazaar. A couple of years later, William Shawn hired her to write the ‘briefly noted’ reviews of historical novels and murder mysteries for the New Yorker.I asked people at the office who had known Maeve what she looked like when she arrived (strangely, I hadn’t been able to find any ...”

“... Behind her the Italian countryside is bathed in a warm autumnal light that sets off the delicate white and cream of her softly ruffled dress and fashionable Leghorn hat. She too is fair, her pink and white complexion carefully shaded from the afternoon sun. Painted by Angelica Kauffman in Naples and Rome in 1785 and ...”

“... Wars. A tall bow-fronted house, it’s a bed and breakfast done out ‘boutique-style’, with white duvets, chocolate suede furnishings and modern ceramics. It was built on the site of a 16th-century cottage burned down in the Blitz and was recently renamed in keeping with the cobbled streets and battlements of the old garrison town. Across Portsmouth ...”

“... the cultural shortcomings of the planters he encountered and appalled by the living conditions of white labourers. He had been led to believe that housing would be on a par with that in New England: Nine times out of ten, at least … I slept in a room with others, in a bed which stank, supplied with but one sheet, if with any; I washed with utensils common ...”

“... The only inaugural address with claims to have decisively shaped what followed came in 1841 when William Henry Harrison – ‘Old Tippecanoe’ – was so keen to show he was capable of observing the proprieties that he delivered a two-hour disquisition on constitutional government without a coat or hat in the cold and wet Washington winter. He caught a ...”

“... wore sandals and a sort of kimono, and displayed a few Chinese objets d’art in his almost empty white room. He served Chinese tea, which didn’t taste like tea at all. The interview ended with my inadvertently addressing him as ‘Father’, from a lifetime of habit as a Catholic schoolboy. Morris was Jewish, one of the first Jews I had ever met, making it ...”

“... his special friend and constant adviser, the former advertising mogul he made director of the CIA, William Casey. Casey and the gang of right-wing fanatics he quickly promoted to the White House were obsessed with the clandestine. They didn’t think much of elected politicians, and preferred to carry out their policies ...”

“... hellish cacophony of sounds, ranging from screaming rabbits to Buddhist chants. The FBI director, William Sessions, began to worry that his men were suffering from fatigue. Concluding that no more cult members would be released, Sessions and Janet Reno, the newly-appointed Attorney-General who was in overall charge of the operation, decided to smoke out the ...”