“... of Barack Obama, Oscar Grant, a 22-year-old unarmed black man, was shot in the back by a white transit officer in Oakland, California while lying face down on a train platform with his hands behind his back. He was taken to a nearby hospital, where he died seven hours later. Minutes before, Grant and several other men had been herded from a train by ...”

“... by African Americans – autobiographies, religious tracts and poems – but sometimes white authors pretended to be black. Mattie Griffith, the author of Autobiography of a Female Slave (1856), revealed herself to be white within weeks of publication. Even where the hand that held the pen was black, a certain ...”

“... 1866 the Leavenworth Times denounced the formulation as ‘disagreeably grammatical’; Strunk and White’s 1979 edition of Elements of Style, the revered American style manual, declared ‘he or she’ ‘boring or silly’. Today ‘he or she’ doesn’t even have the virtue of being grammatical, disagreeably or not, because ‘everyone’ includes ...”

“... a year or so later, is also board- (and perhaps bored-) stiff. Five years on, in 1760, he painted William Brooke, four times Mayor of Doncaster: a mercer dressed in good brown velvet with a great belly swelling above spread knees, and arms akimbo. This pose of the fat man of authority (it is similar to the one Ingres put M. Bertin the banker in) would be used ...”

“... or black nose or cheek, will often be the brightest part of the face – brighter than the ‘white’ of the eye, which is, in fact, usually grey and shadowed by the eye socket – is one step on the path leading from naive to ‘realistic’ representations of faces. Shadows and shading in pictures represent the variations in the light reflected from ...”

“... to banish persons who might well have been hanged. ‘The Liberties of a free people,’ wrote William Paley, ‘permit not those precautions and restraints, that inspection, scrutiny, and control, which are exercised with success in arbitrary governments.’ The Transportation Act rid the country of troublemakers, saved the government the cost of building ...”

“... has much the same effect on the reader – resignation rapidly succeeded by indifference. Cecil William Mercer (as Yates was christened) was born into a family of the lower professional classes, i.e. small Kentish lawyers who had been a bit bigger before the two senior partners blew the kitty. Little Cecil went to an obscure and now defunct prepper in ...”

“... hung rather dull and limp like big tarps or giant laundry. Red would have been better, or black or white, but all these colours have political associations, and everything about The Gates was dictated by an assiduous avoidance of any such significance. It’s easy to understand why: Christo and Jeanne-Claude first petitioned to do the piece in 1979 but ...”

“... in cash, with the remainder in interest-bearing instalments. The highest sum paid was $1750 for William, a carpenter – an immense amount at a time when the average working-class white person earned around $300 per year. George, Sue and their two young sons together went for $2480. The sale was managed by Joseph Bryan, a ...”

“... like his poems, had a wilful, manufactured look. (He had, in fact, changed it by deed poll from William Guinneach Gunn to Thompson William Gunn – Thompson was his mother’s maiden name.) It was clear, too, that he enjoyed his own style, his wit, his urge to dismiss what was dull and cautious, to celebrate what was ...”

“... bleached and drained of blood by the ruins, basilicas and colossi of Rome, those ‘long vistas of white forms whose marble eyes seemed to hold the monstrous light of an alien world’. For the new Mrs Casaubon, Rome’s spiritual splendour, its role as historic centre, could only suck the colour from the present day, and I wondered, looking at those two ...”

“... The anti-immigrant zealot John Kelly – once considered the only ‘adult’ in the White House when he was chief of staff – joined Caliburn’s board immediately after leaving government.*In a televised interview with Vice President Pence, the host reads from an article about the camps in which the children are described as ...”

“... dared to print the name of the head of MI6, Christopher Curwen. The heads of the CIA and the KGB, William Casey and Victor Chebrikov, are of course public figures. But that, as Mr Ingham would say, is not the point. What the point is remains obscure. In 1932 the novelist Compton Mackenzie was tried for a number of breaches of the Official Secrets Act which ...”

“... These shade into the unhappy husbands of the 1950s and 1960s, with their deadening but precarious white-collar jobs, and their drinking problems. The few excursions away from these areas – there are stories set in Hollywood, and stories about political speech-writing – have biographical explanations. Like many writers, Yates felt compelled to rewrite ...”

“... Quayle’s buddy Robert Owen, firing off memos from his state-of-the-art crisis centre in the White House. And then there was Oliver North the thug, drafting directives that authorised CIA operatives ‘to “neutralise” terrorists’, supporting ‘pre-emptive strikes’ against Arab states or leaders whom America thought responsible for such ...”