“... back the Clinton era Rubinites. Yet he’s still saying that if in the autumn Obama keeps the White House and the Democrats take Congress and ‘they are willing to play hardball, we can put my stuff into effect.’ If only the Democrats were to display any interest in that stuff. When they aren’t capitulating to Republican intimidation, they’re ...”

“... over two hundred pages, with more than a hundred colour plates, as well as a series of black and white portrait photographs of the artists taken by Johnnie Shand Kydd. It has five catalogue essays, several pages of artists’ biographies, a bibliography and, as the very last item in the book, a six-page checklist of the 110 works in the exhibition, with an ...”

“... among the most famous photographs ever taken. So stark is the contrast between Aldrin in his white spacesuit and the empty grey desert he stands on – the black of space beyond, the sun out of sight – that while it is, obviously, a photograph of a man on the moon it is also a picture of the living and the dead. For Armstrong, who always saw things ...”

“... I thought you were on your holyers!’ We sit and contemplate the high domed peak of Errigal, its white quartzy screes making it look snowy, beautiful, impossible. Two days later, Giti and I drive back to Errigal and climb it: a hard, steep climb over shaly paths, but it’s a warm, sunny day and we sit on the peak and look out over the country, cloud-shadows ...”

“... singer Carol Grimes. To advertise the concert, RAR supporters spraypainted an image onto a plain white sheet, photographed it, and then reduced the image to a flier. In their enthusiasm, they forgot to include the time of the gig. Security was put on by the Royal Group of Docks Shop Stewards Committee. Widgery remembers the dockers arriving with a bulky ...”

“... and the provocations of a monkey-man trickster in a black bodysuit and red parrot feathers. His white-painted skull face is the gearstick knob brought to life. He waves a thick phallic wand and twangs his bond-market braces, the cocky lord of a museum universe. We have arrived at the Upper Perené reservation (or theme park) of Pampa Michi, once a coffee ...”

“... called the Violet Quill had formed, and its members – Christopher Cox, Robert Ferro, Michael Grumley, Andrew Holleran, Felice Picano, Edmund White and George Whitmore, together with the film critic Vito Russo and the editor and academic George Stambolian – began producing books whose examination of gay ...”

“... the fetching. More engaging is a visit to the village of Middleton, and to the poet and critic Michael Hamburger, whose dreams and memories might have been created expressly for this book. ‘Why it was that on my first visit to Michael’s house I instantly felt as if I lived or had once lived there, in every respect ...”

“... Village because nothing ever happens there.’ Perry Scholes, the protagonist and narrator of Michael Symmons Roberts’s first novel, Patrick’s Alphabet, is obsessed with Weegee. Perry is a modern ambulance chaser who patrols the suburban ‘edgelands’ of the M4 corridor and the M25 in self-conscious imitation of the master. He tunes in to the police ...”

“... after the night of 14-15 April 1912 about the ‘good press’ the story was receiving. The white spaces and big lettering of newspapers had, he thought, ‘an incongruously festive air’, with ‘a disagreeable effect of feverish exploitation of a sensational Godsend’. Even before the ship sank it seemed as if the century of progress was pregnant ...”

“... no viable ‘moderate’ opposition to Assad, and the US was arming extremists. Lieutenant General Michael Flynn, director of the DIA between 2012 and 2014, confirmed that his agency had sent a constant stream of classified warnings to the civilian leadership about the dire consequences of toppling Assad. The jihadists, he said, were in control of the ...”

“... the South Atlantic, the Indian Ocean and the China Sea. These ships were very pretty things, with white painted upperworks, black hulls with red waterlines, yellow funnels and masts. (A version of this livery survives in the last royal yacht, Britannia, now moored as a museum piece in Edinburgh, and also on matchboxes.) The decks of this late Victorian Navy ...”

“... The vote​ for Donald Trump may well have been what Michael Moore called the ‘biggest fuck-you ever recorded in human history’, delivered by the white working class to spite ‘the establishment’. But it isn’t just the size of the fuck-you that matters; it’s also who delivers it ...”

“... be vindicated in their appeals, even though they had one trump card up their sleeves: they were white. The petitioners’ circumstances were unusual: they had been transported to Barbados as suspected Royalist insurgents after the failed Salisbury Uprising of 1655. But, in the mid-17th century, white people could be found ...”

“... a seat on Lambeth Council. I had worked for two magazines considered left-wing – Tribune, under Michael Foot, and the New Statesman, under Paul Johnson. It was a different world. In those distant days, Harold Wilson was the Prime Minister. He was being assailed by ‘left-wingers’, people like me, for being too subservient to the United States ...”