“... if ever there was one, all bunting and border controls – which seemed to represent a victory for white van men everywhere. A huge Tory majority looked like the next tabloid fantasy to come true, shoving Britain down a Trump-shaped hole into a post-truth world.That the Daily Mirror, despite being a tabloid, tends not to be written about as if it were one is ...”

“... but uninspired. Her civil servants liked her but thought her more a manager than a leader. Tony Crosland, her chief at education during the first Wilson government, was frustrated by her tendency to get mired in detail. Contrast this with the record of Barbara Castle, Labour’s top woman at a string of second-rank ministries a few years earlier. Like ...”

“... why his political satire, which generally comes across as crass and simplistic on the page (Stupid White Men, Dude, Where’s My Country?), rises to a different level on the screen. By the time he found his medium, with the film Roger and Me in 1989, he had spent more than a decade in various ventures in print journalism, all of which ended in ...”

“... published in the LRB (5 August). The idea for the poem came from a comment in an excellent book by Tony Sharpe on Wallace Stevens, in which he speculates on the flocks of pigeons mentioned in the last lines of ‘Sunday Morning’: And, in the isolation of the sky, At evening, casual flocks of pigeons make Ambiguous undulations as they sink, Downward to ...”

“... as far as nuclear weapons are concerned, Iraq is much less of a threat now than it was in 1991. Tony Blair and George W. Bush do not want us to think like this. Khidhir Hamza is the source of many of the headlines claiming that Iraq is on the verge of (or already has) a nuclear weapon capability. The Guardian reported on 1 August that Iraq would have ...”

“... as a faintly preposterous dandy: ‘His silver grey suits, pink shirts, with his powdered pink and white face, his nerves, his manners, his love of praise’. ‘You make a distressingly lifelike loose woman,’ Runciman gasped after seeing him in a college sketch show. Runciman, who had won a scholarship to read history at Trinity, fitted naturally into this ...”

“... then home secretary. In 1988 Mrs Thatcher banned his voice from being broadcast but a decade later Tony Blair negotiated with him as a key participant in the peace process. Today he has easy access to the top British leadership. But Adams has not been entirely rehabilitated. In 2013 the police questioned him about his failure to disclose his brother’s sex ...”

“... shy and misunderstood. The following year he received a presidential pardon due in part, the White House said, to lobbying by the powerful and unlikely duo of Henry Kissinger and Elton John. Nonetheless Amiel remains furious at the way she and Black have been treated and is intent on establishing his innocence on all counts. Her memoir is a bookend to ...”

“... deaths in both countries, with ethnic minorities heavily overrepresented. Meanwhile, rage against white supremacism is exploding on American streets. Whatever the fate of these uprisings, the largest since the 1960s, a period of devastation lies ahead. Tens of millions of people are likely to lose their livelihoods and their dignity.As a general insurrection ...”

“... I found the sight of district nurses in their navy blue raincoats both reassuring and appropriate. White coats have gone too now, with doctors indistinguishable from patients except that the doctors are in shirt-sleeves. I like white coats. But then I’m a butcher’s son. White coats ...”

“... described her as ‘the most ignorant politician of her level that I’d come across until I met Tony Blair’, but he thought she was at least touchingly aware of her ignorance, ‘the eternal scholarship girl’. He summed it up by saying: ‘I always liked her, but she always bored me a bit.’ Being boring is a sin for an intellectual. But it is not ...”

“... made the Hole into a camera obscura with lid and lens. The collective painted the walls of the pit white, with gesso and gum. Those who came down the ladder into the earth cell, after their eyes adjusted to the absence of light, found the experience captivating. The world above appeared in phantom form, inverted, a ribbon of articulate shadows, trees like ...”

“... Victoria cinema. On a visit to Cramond, on the city’s outskirts, he had noticed on the terribly white wall of the public lavatory a lone graffito: ‘Is there nobody queer in Cramond?’ Karl wanted out.It was at Cambridge that I first met him. We were both born in Edinburgh, but his background was working-class and mine was not. That seemed not to ...”

“... ideas from his communist and left-wing rivals: clean-up campaigns, anti-corruption purges and the white short-sleeved uniforms that were meant to convey the PAP’s purity. Meanwhile, his ‘Asian Values’ campaign and his 1980s eugenics programme – one of the few initiatives his citizens rejected – owe debts to Japanese fascism, and the PAP’s ...”

“... 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 ...”