“... tale. Anti-semitism was not uncommon in postwar Britain, whether among the establishment (Montagu Norman, for example, the governor of the Bank of England, was notoriously anti-semitic) or on the street – in 1947 there were anti-semitic riots in several British cities. In 1948, there were race riots of a different kind in Liverpool, when ...”

“... ring, as she said she would.Ionce​ went to a fancy dress party as Beauvoir: I wound a black and white scarf round my head as a turban, but people kept asking who I was supposed to be and I kept having to get my copy of Le Deuxième Sexe out of my back pocket to explain. I now think this might have pleased Beauvoir, who didn’t want to be remembered for a ...”

“... enough. Yet elsewhere, in a rare moment of apparent inadvertence, he paradoxically classifies the Norman monarchy after the Conquest as absolutist. There have been so many perverse claims for English exceptionalism in this period that it would be churlish to make too much of this contradiction. But it points to a more general problem. The tacit modulation ...”

“... the ‘negation of exile’ but also, and paradoxically, to reinvent themselves as citizens of the white West – in Herzl’s words, as a ‘rampart of Europe against Asia’. Brit Shalom’s vision of reconciliation and co-operation with the indigenous population was unthinkable to most Zionists, because they regarded the Arabs of Palestine as squatters on ...”

“... it might be a clothesline, ‘old and dark grey’: ‘It had burst open and was giving up its white pith.’ Or it might be a locker room, where ‘hair pieces like Skye terriers waited for their masters’; or a courtroom, where a lawyer called Cannibal Pinsker has ‘a large yellow cravat that lay on his shirt like a cheese omelette’; or an old ...”

“... to her when she read it in A Passage to India. She had started out as a missionary among the white savages of Britain, and by the Twenties and Thirties had come to see herself as another version of Forster’s Mrs Moore. Like Mrs Moore, she possessed a ‘double vision’, which in her case reflected the dual provenance of the Fabian Society – its ...”

“... A first attempt to create an NHS came in 1944, with the publication of a woolly and confusing White Paper. GPs, for example, were to be employed, probably on a salaried basis, by a Central Medical Board. The British Medical Association concluded that this was ‘the thin end of the wedge of a form of service to which it is overwhelmingly opposed – a ...”

“... Ciccio, part of a bizarre troupe, the Natcha-Kee-Tawaras, who do a crowd-pulling act called ‘The White Prisoner’: they are effectively a spoof of the primitivist authenticity that Lawrence elsewhere venerates so fulsomely. Ciccio is, as Hough remarked with some regret, ‘one of the long series of saturnine men of the people – gypsies, gamekeepers or ...”

“... as yet entirely unthreatening. Soon afterwards, he landed the part of the largest dwarf in Snow White at school. We don’t know if he stole the show. It was only when his father forced him into a tedious job in Vienna’s Anglo-Austrian bank that he caught the acting bug. He got himself sacked for wiggling his ears at his boss, a story he later ...”

“... opposed but Henderson put in a superb performance on the beachhead. He requisitioned a large white stallion from a nearby farm and rode down from the dunes; as one veteran remembered half a century later, he ‘wis gettin’ it to rise up on its hind legs, like in an oil painting! And the boys were all cheerin’.’ Splashing through the waves ...”

“... path. Take Marco Rubio, a former protégé of Bush, who is often hailed as the great other-than-white hope for a party that fares badly among younger and Latino voters. On paper, Rubio presents as an American success story in the log-cabin mould: the son of struggling Cuban immigrants, he scaled the heights of the American meritocracy. He had a youthful ...”

“... Hollywood exile, where, in one photo, he stares at the camera wearing sunglasses and sporting a white goatee, the very picture of the playboy philosopher – a fucked-out burn-out who still has a seductive way with words. To borrow a word from Norman Mailer, Tynan was a sexologue – an ideologue about sex. He was an ...”

“... world – prostitutes – are least in a position to utilise this invaluable experience as art. Norman Mailer has said that there won’t be a really great woman writer – one, you understand, con cojones and everything – until the first call-girl tells her story. Though it’s reasonable to assume that, when she does, Mailer won’t like it at all, the ...”

“... were for a long time privileged zones – the terrains of St John Philby and Robert Byron, of Norman Douglas and Patrick Leigh-Fermor, of R.W.Seton-Watson and Rebecca West. Sorties farther afield – like Peter Fleming’s expeditions to the Gobi or Matto Grosso – were fewer. Paradoxically, the vast expanse of the Empire itself was not fertile soil for ...”

“... a chapter to itself in an 1897 book on women’s sweated labour, Robert Harborough Sherard’s White Slaves of England. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, Cradley Heath was known as the world’s capital of hand-hammered chain-making, and boasted, somewhat weirdly, that the anchor chain of the Titanic had been manufactured there. It was an ...”