“... when an apparent suicide pilot crashed a single-engined Cessna airplane on the south lawn of the White House in 1994, jokers suggested it might be the CIA director trying to get an appointment with the president. The anti-Communist revolt that began at Herat in western Afghanistan in March 1979 originated in a government initiative to teach girls to ...”

“... in the middle of a field.20 January. Collected by the New Yorker and taken to be photographed by Richard Avedon, now a grey-haired faun of 72 who says he’s bored with taking snapshots in the studio (this morning Isaiah Berlin and Stephen Spender) and wants to photograph me outside. ‘Outside’ means that eventually I find myself perched up a tree in Hyde ...”

“... reign of terror and blood perpetuated by the Ku Klux Klan’, were an affliction both to ‘the white and the coloured people’. He insisted that this violence was rooted in the barbarism of US slavery, an institution which, ‘bad and debasing as it was for the negro’, was ‘probably even worse for whites … for it stupefied their conscience ...”

“... the works of Mao Zedong. Through Hilda, he met and became friends with an American Marxist, Harold White, and in due course, with survivors of Castro’s Moncada rebellion. The Guatemalan revolution was nearing its end. In July 1954, an invading army, backed by the CIA, overthrew the elected government of Arbenz and replaced it with a military dictatorship, a ...”

“... been so. Woodward’s first Watergate article wasn’t about the scandal named after the huge, white, swirling 1960s complex beside the Potomac. It was about one of the building’s better-known residents, Martha Mitchell, wife of then US attorney general John Mitchell, soon to leave that post to become head of Nixon’s Committee to Re-Elect the ...”

“... a laureate of American empire, openly echoing Kipling as he urges his countrymen to take up the white man’s burden by fighting ‘the savage wars of peace’. He complained continually about Americans’ reluctance to embrace their imperial responsibilities and shed blood abroad. Like other stenographers for the national security state, he was appalled by ...”

“... set within a shopping mall, Grand Central, which blurs into another shopping mall, the Bull Ring. Richard Vinen, writing the first serious history of Birmingham in a long while, is aware of how hard it is to pin the city down, to explain what it is or what it is for. Planners in the 1960s, he says, ‘were sometimes perplexed as to why Birmingham had been ...”

“... would-be agent of incestuous retribution is a young man, part Negro but easily passing for white, named Charles Bon. Close to the beginning of the Civil War, Bon discovers that by his partially Negro mother in Haiti, he is the never acknowledged, even if financially assisted, son of the now remarried, immensely propertied Mississippi planter Thomas ...”

“... feature of the ‘American exceptionalism’ celebrated in the introduction. He identifies white supremacy as another constitutive feature of the United States, one that became ever more pervasive after the Emancipation Proclamation, and one which, according to Evans, white Americans have had more difficulty coming ...”

“... of show-business, it is unlikely that any overweight person will ever again be elected to the White House. A necessary (if not sufficient) condition for electoral success nowadays is that one should ‘come over well’ on television. And fat people, by and large and on the average, do not. Mr Cockerell’s absorbing book might, at first, be seen as a ...”

“... in New York City. ‘It was wonderful, and revelatory as it always is,’ he told his friend Tony White. ‘I learn more about people and myself in NY than anywhere else. I got offered a job in a tough-queer 3rd Avenue bar the day before I left, and if I hadn’t been under contract to Berkeley I’d have accepted it’ (he’d been given a visiting ...”

“... quartet play Schubert everyone formed up in a line. A drum was beaten somewhere ahead, girls in white robes scattered flowers, and we all went zig-zagging up a path to the little concrete structure in which Lawrence’s ashes are reputedly incorporated. In front of it is the tombstone of Frieda Lawrence, and of her third husband, Angelo Ravagli; above it is ...”

“... world, he reminisces about the journey he made, the spillage from life into artefact: black and white photographs, home-movie footage, drawings by Eden, letters from friends. And bushels of porn. The outer chamber is stacked with tastefully framed images of pink people doing pink things; limited scenarios enacted, with limited enthusiasm, in budget hotel ...”

“... the city’s deadly riots in 1965 and 1992; the formative years spent in southern California by Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, and the region’s postwar conservative movement, which greatly influenced their presidencies; and last year’s protests over policing and racism, which were among the largest in the US. The rest of the time, you might ...”

“... kind of clothing that will make you look poverty stricken.’ She wrote about meeting the actor Richard Pryor, who in the course of their interviewbought a gold necklace … for the woman he had introduced as his girlfriend … a gold ring for his manager and a gold ring for his valet … wrote a cheque for sixteen hundred dollars to his jeweller ...”