“... own terror and confusion as he drifted through the war zone, and it allowed Joan Didion, in The White Album, to weave details of her anxious upscale-Californian life into a startling account of the collapse of Sixties idealism. No one took the voice of the journalist further away from ‘neutral background’ (or seemed less able to stop himself doing ...”

“... his aspect. The surf flew in all directions about him, and his course towards us was marked by a white foam a rod in width, which he made with the continual violent thrashing of his tail; his head was about half out of water, and in that way he came upon, and again struck the ship. This time the bow was stove in, and the whale, pumping its tail in a froth ...”

“... returned, anchoring the Emma in the bay of Naples while the battle raged in the city. He wore a white costume, bombarded the city with revolutionary proclamations from his own printing press, distributed guns, and set his on-board tailors to sew red shirts for Garibaldi’s Thousand. When Naples fell, he made no effort to conceal his delight at the collapse ...”

“... makes the point about the crucial role of topography, institution, description, naming: one empty white room after another, each of them different, and each of them revealing. A space cooled by an air-conditioner that is recycling water from the morgue where the corpses of victims of Mexico’s drug war are washed (Air, 2003, by Teresa Margolles) gives a very ...”

“... When she became first lady in 1993, she demanded and obtained an office in the West Wing of the White House, the space formally given over to politics, not in the East Wing, which is ostensibly social and domestic. No less against all precedent, it was from here – the headquarters of America’s head of state – that she campaigned successfully to be a ...”

“... the book version (published in 1986) appears in one of the later photographs, covered in lines of white powder. In the introduction, Goldin writes that ‘if each picture is a story, then the accumulation of these pictures comes closer to memory, a story without end.’ The last photographs in the slideshow point to endings: rooms emptied of people, an open ...”

“... 9835. This created the Federal Employee Loyalty and Security Program, a decision, as Truman’s White House counsel Clark Clifford later admitted, driven by the prospect of the 1948 election and not by any security menace: ‘We did not believe there was a real problem. A problem was being manufactured.’ Truman himself, in private correspondence, said ...”

“... to the other, from cool, cruel blue to Townshend’s three-minute psychodrama – ‘I look all white/but my dad was black’ – was the brief, paradoxical flare of Mod: the story of how a small cabal of British jazz obsessives conducting a besotted affair with the style arcana of Europe and America somehow became an army of scooter-borne rock fans, draped ...”

“... and a Promethean sacrifice to make: this welcome ordeal is forecast in ‘Yer Blues’ on the ‘White Album’ (1968), where the liver’s left alone, but the eagle goes straight for the eyes – vision itself, a Lennonologist would tell you. This notion of the rock and roll performer going back to what he knows best is opposed to what the made-over Lennon ...”

“... to the sink, started washing up and as she scraped the golden fleece scourer around a blue and white striped cup, she quit. The resolute non-quitter is Alexis Scott, a chanteuse whose song is ending as she appears in this first paragraph of Patrice Chaplin’s Saraband, a spicy tale of lust and cuisine in London NW1. The book begins splendidly, and it has ...”

“... and a horndog’. (Prison wine is called ‘pruno’.) There is Laura Lipp, the only other white woman in the unit besides Romy, a loopy committer of infanticide who compares herself to Medea. Sammy Fernandez, Romy’s closest friend, is the child of an addict and has spent a lifetime in and out of institutions, beginning with Child Protective Services ...”

“... than in a typical week for that month.’ The city was wholly unprepared for the disaster: Mayor Richard Daley was out of town, and returned to a fully fledged health emergency; the generators of the electricity conglomerate Commonwealth Edison malfunctioned owing to the extra demand; city hospitals and morgues were overwhelmed by the crush of heat-stress ...”

“... massed choirs and a packed flag-waving audience ruled out on medical grounds,’ Richard Morrison wrote, ‘there will never be a better moment to drop that toe-curlingly embarrassing anachronistic farrago of nationalistic songs that concludes the Last Night of the Proms.’ He was referring to ‘Rule Britannia!’ and ‘Land of Hope and ...”

“... Being laid back about being laid was de rigueur.’ Suu, as she was known, wore tight white jeans, made a fool of herself punting, had her heart broken by a dashing Pakistani, and experimented with alcohol, once and once only, in the lavatory of the Bodleian. But ‘by the popular morality of the time Suu was a pure Oriental ...”

“... and the insidious cult of “breaking the rules”’. In the introduction to his second volume, White Heat, Sandbrook assures his readers that he has tried to avoid ‘the predictable and tiresome ritual’ of either demonising or romanticising the 1960s. This implies that he doesn’t have an argument, which is far from the case. But however partial they ...”