“... in New York after losing themselves in the subway system. According to Zukofsky’s best friend, Jerry Reisman, Niedecker arrived in New York already in love with Zukofsky. Shortly after introducing herself, Niedecker began unpacking and, to Zukofsky’s distress, produced an iron and ironing-board. She had every intention of staying for a while. Zukofsky ...”

“... streets, the people the occupation brought out were an extraordinary mix, though overwhelmingly white: born-again Prairie Christians, anti-communist Eastern European immigrants, New Age anti-vaxxers (‘my body, my choice’), loudmouth hockey mums, free-thinking Mohawks, dreadlocked weed-smokers, curious small-towners and their snow-suited kids, all ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... movie – I don’t see too many movies but I try to see them on weekends when I am at the Western White House or in Florida – and the movie I selected, or, as a matter of fact, my daughter Tricia selected it, was Chisum with John Wayne. It was a Western. FDR was known to admire Myrna Loy and Ike to enjoy watching shoot-’em-ups; underdog Harry Truman had ...”

“... szszszsz.’ Sometimes Billy zones out entirely and there’s a sprinkling of words on white space: ‘currj’, ‘double y’im dees’, ‘Sod’m’, ‘Eye-rack’, ‘Eaaaar-rock’, ‘soooh-preeeeme sacrifice’ – the concrete poetry of ‘freeman moxy’, as Steve Bell’s Bush used to call it. Billy gets cornered by these speakers, then ...”

“... than the defeat of the Democrats as the party of all Americans (with the exception of heterosexual white males and non-feminist white females), though that too it certainly was. At a slightly deeper level the election results reflect the breakdown of the Cold War structure of US domestic politics – exactly the same kind of ...”

“... on what they affectionately call ‘Our Hill’. The President’s secretary, who lives at the White House (and has lived with the President since he was Governor of New York), thinks her boss will be moving into the cottage with her. The President’s wife, another cousin, stays in her own fieldstone cottage on the estate when she is there without her ...”

“... its time (apart from a Native American cop/tracker and a Chinese femme fatale, the town was wholly white), and Laura’s and the killer’s multiple identities clearly had some imaginative traffic with the 1980s recovered-memory movement. Still, almost from the moment of its cancellation the show sidestepped datedness by becoming an object of nostalgia, thanks ...”

“... women came forward, grinned and asked what I wanted: their mothers would once have been used to white men striding into the compound with briefcases but such sights are now too far in the colonial past to be entirely believable. I told them my problem. ‘We can’t help you,’ they said. ‘We have no vehicle to get you to Chivhu. You need Mr Bhunu. He ...”

“... and more pervasive. The video footage of Floyd’s death offered evidence of both an ideology (white supremacy) and the system that sustains it (racism) at their most fundamental level: state murder. In the following months it sparked debate not just about policing in America, but school curriculums in Britain, the repertoire of the Paris Opéra, St ...”

“... by Oprah. Trauma narration is a popular genre, especially on TV. It’s not just Ricki Lake and Jerry Springer: Friends or Frasier or Sex and the City or Will and Grace supply comforting fodder for Friday-night viewing – recognisable types, recognisable low-level traumas (couple angst, single angst, sex angst). The question is whether Oates’s variant of ...”

“... 2009 book Kissinger’s Year: 1973, a panegyric like Indyk’s, quotes conversations from White House tape recordings that Indyk omits. These depict Kissinger more as Nixon’s yes-man than as the arbiter of the fate of the Middle East. Kissinger repeatedly assures his antisemitic benefactor that ‘I agree with you completely, Mr President’ or ‘I ...”

“... who fail excellently. Turn the book over, lift up the flap. We don’t look too bad in black and white, do we, our hair artfully mussed, our beards half-grown, our eyeglasses polished. But can’t you see the fear in our charmingly narrowed eyes? The fear that you’ll realise the truth about us? That we are, deep down, self-disgusted losers? Or maybe ...”

“... West Africa. I went to visit Emmanuel Lafont, a French Catholic priest who was one of the very few white people living in the vast black township of Soweto, outside Johannesburg. I sat with Lafont in his ill-lit office at the back of St Philip Neri, his parish church. The adjacent bedroom had been turned into a drop-in dormitory for young boys and as the night ...”

“... Confessions of Nat Turner, as racist and perverted, Genovese carried on a spirited defence of the white author from Virginia and his right to make artistic excursions into history. His next book, The World the Slaveholders Made (1969), moved him further along the right-veering road, with a critique of the maverick George Fitzhugh’s pro-slavery ...”