“... the death of their 11-year-old son Willie, Lincoln and his wife Mary arrange for seances in the White House, we learn about the popularity of spiritualism. Mention of Uncle Tom’s Cabin leads to a discussion of the emotional intensity of mid-century writing and what Reynolds calls the ‘opportunistic sensationalism’ of reformers who dwelled on the ...”

“... Police raided a house in Lees Holm, a mixed area between mostly Asian Savile Town and mostly white Thornhill Edge. Mohammad Sidique Khan, the leader of the 7 July bombers, had lived there only for a few months, but his wife, Hasina, and his mother-in-law, Farida Patel, were local: ‘99 per cent of the community had never heard of Khan,’ a Savile Town ...”

“... for representing the world as it is. Reported detail is not just roughage but nourishment, and Richard Price’s Lazarus Man could have been written in honour of Wolfe’s prescriptions.Wolfe proposed journalism as a necessary ingredient of consequential fiction, repeating the prediction he made in 1973 in The New Journalism that the future of the novel ...”

“... the tiled halls, and now and again there was the silent apparition of a bald-headed man in a white towelling dressing-gown. I rented a cubicle, about which I remember only the enormous size of the key, and I lay down to sleep, but I couldn’t. I passed the night with a high fever, travelling through strange, lurid nightmares. In my lucid moments, I ...”

“... the story. A lad from Liverpool seized black rhythm and blues and transformed it. The sound that white America found too funky for its clean earlobes was re-synthesised by the Beatles and ricocheted out of Matthew Street and the Reeperbahn to recapture Teensville USA. J.W. Lennon, grammar-school dissident and art-school yobbo, used the idiom of rock and roll ...”

“... history. Most striking was the impetus given to the careers of black authors: Zora Neale Hurston, Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison were given their first chance by the FWP. Its ambition was to create – or rather to discover – a great American epic in the acts and words of ordinary men and women: to draw from the disregarded speech and customs of the ...”

“... left of the natural material used by Picasso or Michelangelo is some salient property – the hard white sheerness of marble, the egg-yellowness of chromate. The materials of the land artists – the bush, the tree, the moor from which the material has cropped up – retain their fibrousness or graininess, dirtiness or translucency, as nearly as can be in ...”

“... called Winston Lord quickly got into a limousine with Zhou and set off, leaving Bob Haldeman, the White House chief of staff, frantic with worry over their security. They entered Mao’s house, finding it ‘simple and unimposing’, as Kissinger noted, and with a ping-pong table in the hall. Then they encountered Mao himself: shuffling, speaking with ...”

“... pilots can be heard saying, ‘It’s a fucking drone, bro,’ as the camera locks onto a small white blob (the camera is in ‘white-hot’ mode, so hot things show up as white), longer than it is wide, flying over the clouds at a steady distance from the Super Hornet. The other pilot ...”

“... court to Castro, interviewing him on his bed and after thirty minutes declaring him ‘the only white person I have really liked’. But racial politics in Cuba would become a sore point for many of the black nationalists who visited Cuba in the course of the following decade. Some Afro-Cubans had identified with the non-...”

“... voices of the victims, that is what it feels like too. Aids starts in the 1970s. Here’s Edmund White, describing the San Francisco gay ‘look’ in his travel book States of Desire (1980). Bodies made themselves intelligible: A strongly marked mouth and swimming, soulful eyes (the effect of the moustache); a V-shaped torso by metonymy from the open V of ...”

“... his face is also disappointingly generic – a round black visage, a vague thatch of hair and two white circles for eyes. The figure is small – little more than an inch high, in a painting of about eight inches by six – and Tomkins has gone for a shorthand ‘sambo’ caricature rather than any kind of miniaturist detail. A magnifying glass reveals the ...”

“... the Royal Academy of Music, and eventually started playing in a bar, becoming fascinated by Little Richard and Jerry Lee Lewis. He got a Saturday job to fund his record-buying habit. As he became more involved with what was happening in music, he was aware that the older generation was not amused. ‘People fucking hated it. And no one hated it more than my ...”

“... Seabrook says, as Kosoville). Walking with Seabrook along the shore at Margate, subjected to the white noise of puns, submerged quotations, barks of self-intoxicated laughter, is to understand the manifold potentialities of the word ‘front’. North Sea, First War, BNP, con, flash. Seabrook is a very mouthy writer, his rude tongue perpetually thrust into ...”