“... airport staff nonetheless observed and reported to Anwar that the captive was hustled aboard a white, twin-engined, turboprop Gulfstream V executive jet with the registration number N379P painted on its tail. It took off at 2.40 a.m. for an unknown destination. As the Washington Post later reported, at 19.54 on 26 October, Anwar’s story was posted on the ...”

“... non-combatant roles. The evidence suggests that George’s respect was often reciprocated. It was white troops from the colonies who were most cynical about the king’s usefulness to the war effort. Yet if the war boosted the national assertiveness of the dominions – their leaders signed the Treaty of Versailles in their own right and in 1931 they gained ...”

“... get up any energy.’ He sailed, he taught himself Persian, but when you look at him lolling in white ducks and singlet, an eccentric monument, ripped, evenly tanned and rather dazzling, everything about him seems to scream dolce far niente at you. Then, whether it was because of the increasing expense of Italy, the disagreeable impact of fascism, the still ...”

“... a relieving if also embarrassing admission of (then easily ironised) inferiority in a black and white world without gradations, but offering instead a ‘place’. (See the stories ‘Tobold II’ or ‘Simon: A Love Story’ in Masquerade, a collection translated by Susan Bernofsky.) The man who feels such a thing is clearly all at sea, someone with an ...”

“... class distinctions into those of race. In India he sees the social aloofness of the ruling white minority as being reinforced during the 19th century by a growing taboo against sexual intercourse across the colour line. Half a century ago, Percival Spear, in his delightful book The Nabobs, traced the transformation from the 18th-century ménage of the ...”

“... the supplies, weapons and intelligence provided by the United States. In the meantime, the Defence White Paper presents a concise summary of the main lessons of the campaign. It is easy in retrospect to be blasé about the astonishing achievement in mounting the operation at all, and critics of the proposed naval reductions have been quick to point out that ...”

“... heard Martin Luther King speak. And here was an African-American who had risen higher than any non-white person in any Western country, and moreover had done so in a nation that has never, with the exception of the Irish John Kennedy, elected a president from even its white minorities – no Jews, no Poles, no Italians ...”

“... Every year on 8 May, a young woman dressed in armour and carrying a white banner rides in procession through the streets of Orléans in north-central France. Dignitaries of Church and State join in commemorating an event and a life. The event is the French relief of the city, after months of siege by the English, in 1429; the life is that of Joan of Arc, a 17-year-old girl from Lorraine told by heavenly voices to go ‘into France’ and to rescue Orléans ...”

“... as quickly as I managed to get a foot inside the door, I was sent a copy of Byzantium endures – Michael Moorcock. That one, icons iconing, balalaikas balalaikaing, kept me up nights marking pages, memorising passages, and dreaming dreams of a vividness and thrust that I hadn’t experienced since I was in the Army. My well-intentioned friends in Poland ...”

“... has been studying apparitions in Late Medieval Spain. St Ildefonso, St Anthony of Padua and St Michael the Archangel all made their appearance, but the dominant figure was that of the Virgin Mary. At Jaen in 1430, for example, four people saw the Virgin as a tall lady in white: ‘From this lady issued so much brightness ...”

“... In the days​ before artists brought colour to the cover, the London Review of Books was black and white. Of course, originally, it had no front at all: the first edition, in 1979, was meekly folded into the New York Review of Books. The following year it jumped out of that pouch and into a world where literary journals were routinely typographical ...”

“... after the election, Aaron Sorkin’s rant on the Vanity Fair website: ‘The Klan won last night. White nationalists. Sexists, racists and buffoons … misogynistic shitheads everywhere … If he does manage to be a douche nozzle without breaking the law for four years, we’ll make it through those four years.’ Or consider the message read out to Vice ...”

“... off a convincing snarl. Yet he is remembered for certain qualities which appreciate over time. Michael Wreszin’s biography succeeds in spite of its invocation of the conservative revolutionary. While a genuine radical like James Cameron could famously say of himself that he was ‘conservative about everything except politics’, and while it’s true ...”

“... engaging chapters in the book are those on Shakespeare, boy actors on the Elizabethan stage and Michael Jackson, all of whom confront us, in Garber’s view, with the radical undecidability that underlies our outrage for disorder. Michael Jackson ‘in performance erases and detraumatises not only the boundaries between ...”

“... and aching, Achak begins to imagine telling his life story to the boy, whose name he discovers is Michael. Achak’s father was a shopkeeper in Marial Bai, doing business with ‘Baggara and other Arab businessmen’ from the north as well as with local Dinka people. One night, Achak listens as his father tells Sadiq Aziz, his ‘favourite trading ...”