“... So they levered their way in and started to ask for more – much more. The key figures were William Morris and Abe Lastfogel (who together formed the William Morris Agency), Phil Berg, Myron Selznick (who found Vivien Leigh for his brother David), Leland Hayward and, most significant, Lew Wasserman, Ovitz’s abiding ...”

“... in evidence. Yevtushenko is master-of-ceremonies, highly visible in a zoot-suit jacket of black, white and red, like interference or a Mexican blanket. Please Do Not Adjust Your Suit. Around me, people are asking if Raisa Gorbachev has come. She hasn’t, though she attended the Bolshoi festivities the night before: our interpreter turned, saw her, said ...”

“... Neal Ascherson, Mary Beard, Jonathan Coe, Tom Crewe, William Davies, Sionaidh Douglas-Scott, Lorna Finlayson, Daniel Finn, Katrina Forrester, Jeremy Harding, Daisy Hildyard, Colin Kidd, James Meek, Ferdinand Mount, Jan-Werner Müller, Jonathan Parry, David RuncimanNeal Ascherson‘On​ 17 June poor France fell. That day, as we trudged past Greenwich … a tug skipper yelled gaily across the water: “Now we know where we are! No more bloody allies!”’ The writer A ...”

“... and added for good measure that when the Constitution was founded, a Negro had no rights that a white man was obliged to respect. This was historically false, and as Taney admitted no modification in the Constitution’s original meaning, the implications were obvious. (An interesting case, incidentally, of the doctrine of ‘original intent’.) The Dred ...”

“... degraded slave.Douglass was born Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey in Maryland in 1818, to a white man (probably a slaveholder) and an enslaved woman, Harriet Bailey. As he put it in his 1845 memoir, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, his mother, ‘like many other slave women, had many children, but NO FAMILY’. Hired out to a plantation 12 ...”

“... the first person to articulate an elephant’s skeleton, was the younger brother of William Hunter. Both men were pioneering teachers of anatomy. John set up the museum to house his anatomical collection, which has been called his ‘great unwritten book’. Other such collections were either mere taxonomies or else forms of entertainment ...”

“... 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 ...”