“... of debt, direct or indirect, to other writers. For example, he was a lifelong admirer of E.B. White and his correspondence indefatigably quotes White’s colourful definition of a miracle: ‘blue snow on a red barn’. In Lolita, Humbert speaks of ‘our humble blue car and its imperious red shadow’. Of ...”

“... the closing years of the Smith-run settler dictatorship. Worsthorne was hanging out with real white trash like P.K. Van der Byl, Smith’s kinkily sadistic deputy, and Richard Cecil, the brave but dim-bulbed scion of the Salisburys. We met in Meikles bar and had a very frank chat, in the course of which Worsthorne said that while he could easily look ...”

“... in the gym, under the avid gaze of their trainers, including Carmen Graziano, a portly, voluble white man in his late fifties who hangs over the ropes shouting instructions at the sparring fighters. Graziano could be seen in July in The Truth’s corner for the fight against Tyson in the Atlantic City Convention Centre. For Graziano, the event was a ...”

“... of ghosted East End gangster memoirs: bother with the law, church, boxing club, billet in the White Tower, Colchester, battalion champion, guardhouse, on the trot. It is at this point that John Healy’s autobiography diverts spectacularly from the route chosen by those premature Thatcherites, the Brothers Kray. They plunged into the abyss from an ...”

“... in that decade would have worked so hard for their employees or endured such disapproval among the white community for it. In matters of race relations Karen Blixen was half a century ahead of the majority of her English contemporaries. Her willingness to understand the Africans, their varied tribal cultures and the superstitions which formed barriers between ...”

“... risk my life to save a black man or a brown one. I’m not so sure that I’d do that for a white.’ But perhaps that is just the sort of thing people say in interviews, over the Earl Grey tea, as the hyenas howl: he keeps a flat in Chelsea and would presumably help his neighbours in a fire. Down the years the many tribes with whom Thesiger lived were ...”

“... whoop down the avenue. The people who stopped put both hands on the Ferragamo window and the white light made each one a little blonder. One woman said ‘beautiful’; the glass misted up in front of her mouth. I walked on a few blocks. There was a midnight service going on at St Patrick’s Cathedral. A long queue stretched all the way down to the ...”

“... think of the Opera House as a superb example of Goethe’s frozen music; others imagine a beached white whale, a galleon sailing off to Elfland, nine ears cocked to hear some heavenly aria, nine nuns playing football. ‘A bunch of toenails clipped from a large albino dog’, the Sydney journalist Ron Saw once wrote. ‘It looks like something that crawled up ...”

“... or the counterweight Protestant myth in Northern Ireland in which William III for ever rides a white horse. The interest of the Scottish sample of such beliefs lies in the fact that Scottish myths are not an expression of either successful or of frustrated nationalism. They mostly involve Scots holding with immense pride, but little input of ...”

“... roses out of the gutters from the top of a ladder. On one occasion, this man, who was called Peter Cook, annoyed my mother by playfully pelting her with the prunings as she sat in a deckchair on the lawn below. He would often come to the house in the evenings, after work, when my sister was doing her homework and my parents were out – I was at boarding ...”

“... John Christie (Rillington Place), the Wests (Fred and Rose), Dennis Nilsen (Des), Jeremy Bamber (White House Farm), Harold Shipman (Doctor Death) – while American true crime favours American atrocities. I don’t see my preference for the British product as some kind of weird patriotism. It’s written into the genre, because the chief frisson of true ...”

“... attended by the sheriff of Surrey; a fully robed priest; the keeper of the jail solemnly holding a white wand; and the executioner, bearing a drawn sword. Despard, in a dark greatcoat and boots, bare-headed, without wig or powder, was led out, his hands bound with rope. He burst out laughing – ‘Ha! ha!, what nonsensical mummery is this?’ – as he was ...”

“... at last meets his idol, the great writer Bergotte, he gets a terrible shock: instead of the ‘white-haired, sweet Singer’ of his imagination, he sees ‘a young man, uncouth, short, thickset and myopic, with a red nose shaped like a snail-shell and a black goatee’. The fantasy Bergotte vanishes, but the caricature that replaces him is not ...”

“... his extensive property portfolio, his playboy lifestyle, his motley collection of friends (Peter Mandelson, Nat Rothschild, Prince Andrew), his ready access to Libya’s sovereign wealth fund, and his recently professed willingness to eliminate the enemies of his father’s regime one bullet at a time? He’s a hypocrite, of course, but that hardly ...”

“... these thorny issues, but it turns them on their head. No one could doubt that having Trump in the White House is an existential matter: the president’s decisions have the potential to bring many ways of life to an end, including our own. The stakes could hardly be higher. Why then does reading about it so often feel like reading about any other ...”