“... 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 ...”

“... opens in a small courthouse where a Japanese-American fisherman is on trial for the murder of a white fisherman. We soon learn that the accused, Kabuo Miyamoto, was seeking to regain land (lost in the World War Two internment of Japanese-Americans) from Carl Heine, the victim of the presumed murder. A subplot turns on the unresolved feelings of Ismael ...”

“... hardest to acquire. It was touch and go. He died in 1940, just before the British Empire. In 1953, Richard Usborne published a book called Clubland Heroes, which expanded some of the criticisms made of John Buchan in the Thirties: that he was snobbish, blimpish, mildly anti-semitic and a worshipper of worldly success. What infuriated his widow was not so much ...”

“... Itahad, or ‘Unity’. Al Itahad may be no threat to the Americans militarily, but according to Richard Dowden of the Independent it could become a rallying point for disaffected Somalis. The risk of Somalia falling to intemperate Islam – this has been a straw many have clutched at in attempting to explain President Bush’s motives for launching ...”

“... opium-addicted bisexual aristocrat’; Brilliant Chang, ‘the emblematic Dope King and white slaver, corrupter of British maidenhood’; the Marchesa Casati, who appeared at parties surrounded by ‘albino blackbirds, mauve monkeys, a leopard, a boa constrictor, and, among Englishmen, Lord Berners’. The presiding spirit was Oscar Wilde. Robert ...”

“... on the Continent. In the early 17th century libraries of more than a thousand volumes were rare: Richard Bancroft, archbishop of Canterbury between 1604 and 1610, had perhaps the largest of the day at around six thousand volumes. A hundred years later, John Moore, bishop of Ely, had more than thirty thousand books. Moore’s collection is now a star of ...”

“... In the middle of one large ground-floor gallery almost the only exhibit still intact is a stuffed white horse which, when living, belonged to Saddam. Wahad Adnan Mahmoud, a painter who also looks after the gallery, told me the horse had been given to the Iraqi leader in 1986 by the King of Morocco. The King had sent a message along with it saying he hoped ...”

“... Most of New Orleans was black, but most of the doctors and administrators at Memorial were white. ‘I figured, what would they do, these crazy black people who think they’ve been oppressed for all these years by white people,’ one of the doctors told Sheri Fink. ‘I mean if they’re capable of shooting at ...”

“... On 16 October 1859, a white anti-slavery agitator called John Brown led 21 followers in a raid on the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia. A previous expedition against a Kansas slave-owning settlement had ended in five deaths, but Brown had far grander hopes for his new enterprise – to start an insurrection across the South ...”

“... ofturkey makinge of orient colours’, ‘a greate turky carpet with grene wrethes & flowers of white and blewe’ and ‘a percian [Persian] carpet lyke turkye worke’. In Holbein’s great mural for Whitehall Palace (destroyed by fire in 1698), the rucked-up carpet on which Henry VIII stands was probably the work of Muslim craftsmen. When Gremio makes a ...”

“... reinvented himself as an Englishman, and as part of that studied act of identity he used to wear a white rose on the anniversary of the Battle of Bosworth, in memory of Richard III, whom he regarded as the last English – because Plantagenet – king. Coincidentally, Shapiro quotes from a popular postwar textbook, The ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... questions that they askd was, when it would thunder. Joseph Banks, The ‘Endeavour’ Journal Richard Holmes describes The Age of Wonder as a ‘relay race of scientific stories’ about the explosion of exploration and scientific achievement in England between two celebrated voyages, Captain James Cook’s first circumnavigation of the world in the ...”

“... vast crowds of hideous people thronging the streets and bus queues.’ There’s an old-fashioned, white-gloved, Bowes-Lyon kind of superiority to all this, and reading Gielgud’s letters makes you realise how theatrical the business of class often is in this country. It is of course perfectly English to hate people at bus stops, but also English to ...”

“... week. 15 April. I have given all my literary archive to the Bodleian Library and this afternoon Richard Ovenden, the keeper of special collections, comes round to load up the hundred or so box files and take them to Oxford. There will be more in due course, including all my notebooks and the annotated copies of the printed stuff, but I’m very happy to see ...”