“... serious but highly readable, were reappearing as Ash wrote: Rosalind Mitchison, T.C. Smout and Christopher Harvie were among the most successful authors. They wrote mostly narrative or social history, revealing unknown territory to generations who had learned almost nothing of Scotland’s past at school. Now, though, the fashion is more reflexive. Tom ...”

“... to mean many things apart from indissoluble union, but even (or especially) on this reading Edmund White finds the image ‘chilling’, and George Painter has this to say: If [Mme Proust’s] words were given their full, terrible meaning they would imply a mystic union with her son more valid than her marriage, in an alien faith, to his father. But their ...”

“... in the evolution of domestic comfort’. From the moment of that 1925 pavilion, ‘only white austerity was virtuous. Decoration was bad for the soul; it had to be stripped away.’ The freakshow continues right up to the present. Rybczynski deplores the damage done by the ‘socialist post-war governments in England, Germany, Holland and the ...”

“... being made, adapted from a memoir he would never complete, to be called ‘The Return of the Thin White Duke’. This dubious pseudonymous character was first aired in an interview with Rolling Stone’s bumptious but canny young reporter Cameron Crowe; it soon became notorious. Crowe’s scene-setting picture of Bowie at home featured black candles and ...”

“... ran an ‘economic emancipation’ campaign on behalf of the Guptas and Duduzane Zuma attacking ‘white monopoly capital’ – as distinguished, presumably, from the Guptas’ non-white monopoly capital. Europe’s largest software maker, SAP, paid kickbacks to a Gupta front company to get its customer service software ...”

“... which made its targets unrealistic. The new Ministry of Technology, intended to fan the ‘white heat’ of revolution, merely collected problems piecemeal as industries continued to decline. Labour opposed monopolies – but favoured mergers. Britain’s share of world exports of manufactures fell from 12.7 per cent in 1960 to 8.6 in 1970, reflecting ...”

“... punishment any more (except for Islamic fundamentalists and those Christian evangelicals who think Christopher Hitchens will go to hell), but the concept of an afterlife is still hard to throw over. The other day, my parents told me of an ageing friend who had recently abandoned his lifelong atheism and become a Christian. He told my parents, both churchgoing ...”

“... A long pine table which gave Marks plenty of elbow room to roll his herbal mixes. He was in a white shirt, unbuttoned to expose ‘chunks of magical Buddhist gold’. The hair had recovered its collartickling insolence. The voice was strong, warm and macerated in phlegm. He had the genial, tannin glaze of a resting Stone: Ronnie Wood morphing into Bill ...”

“... There was a lot of racial tension around bebop. Black men were going with fine, rich white bitches. They were all over these niggers out in public and the niggers were clean as a motherfucker and talking all kind of hip shit. Trane liked to ask all these motherfucking questions back then about what he should or shouldn’t play ...”

“... muscularity, street smarts and studliness that had found earlier voice in Mailer’s essay ‘The White Negro’ and his novel An American Dream, and in Norman Podhoretz’s stentorian confession ‘My Negro Problem – and Ours’. Sure, the liberal arts are swell, but what good is book-learning in a showdown against the mightily hung? In an interesting ...”

“... symposium ‘on the Negro’. (Symposia on the Negro were popular in the 1960s, helping to keep white liberal panellists occupied and furrowed until the ferocious later phase of Black Power made them all squirm.) Kazin had been unable to attend the symposium itself but, never one to miss a party, popped into the reception being thrown by Commentary’s ...”

“... Two other works throw light on this, and Littell seems to have studied both of them. One is Christopher Browning’s Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 (1992), which revealed that the men of a police unit that systematically shot the Jewish inhabitants of one village after another were not Nazi fanatics or passionate anti-semites. They were ...”

“... is factual; the biographical asides surrounding that drunken social outcast, the Australian poet Christopher Brennan (whom J.C. Squire believed to be an invention of David Peterley’s, and who is now recognised as Australia’s first poet of international significance) may be checked against a long manuscript in the Mitchell Library at Sydney – by Richard ...”

“... a famous shipwreck, ‘wireless ghosts’. One night, he looks out of his window and sees a ‘white figure’ gliding across the lawn: The experience startles him – not least because it plays out in the real and close-up space around the house an aspect of some scenes that he occasionally intuits but never quite pins down when riding the dial’s ...”

“... doesn’t the audience will feel cheated. ‘I bet you’ve found faith now,’ believers wrote to Christopher Hitchens when he announced he had terminal cancer. He insisted he hadn’t. I’d never been envious of those who believe in an afterlife until now. It would be so much cosier than dissolution. She’s gone to the next room. Nope, can’t manage ...”