“... father (second from left, referred to throughout as ‘Father’), his grandfather Szlomo, the white-bearded patriarch of the family who spoke only Yiddish, and his cousin Leon, the editor of a Polish-language Jewish newspaper. At the back stand the only woman, his aunt Helena Loterman, who looked after her father, Szlomo, and her husband, both of whom ...”

“... to bridge gaps, between urban workers and suburban professionals, between rich and poor, between white and black and Latino. By his willingness to change and to transcend the standard political categories, Tye’s Kennedy could have become America’s ‘high priest of reconciliation’. The seventh of the nine children of Joseph and Rose Kennedy, he grew up ...”

“... of​ the great paradoxes of the Obama era is that it encouraged so many liberals, both black and white, to see the black experience in America not as a slow, arduous struggle for freedom culminating in the election of a black president – Obama’s version, not surprisingly – but as an unending nightmare. Not least among the reasons was that a black man ...”

“... Studio Vingt-Huit – high up a winding street of Montmartre, in the full blasphemy of a freezing Sunday; taxis arriving, friends greeting each other, an excitable afternoon audience’. The description is Cyril Connolly’s, the occasion a showing of Luis Buñuel’s first film, Un Chien andalou. The audience seemed baffled at the end, and some of its members were angry, unprepared no doubt for what Connolly called the ‘destructive reverence’ of the film ...”

“... laid the groundwork: at the time, academics at Michigan were doing important work in anthropology (Michael Taussig and Marshall Sahlins), political science (Archie Singham) and African American studies (Harold Cruse). Robinson’s wife and intellectual partner, Elizabeth, began graduate studies in anthropology there, while Robinson joined the politics ...”

“... City is billed as ‘Russia v. The Rest of the World’. In the middle of the party, dressed in a white suit with wide lapels, matching shirt and handkerchief in his breast pocket, his large hands covered in rings, was an elderly man carrying a Louis Vuitton briefcase. At every opportunity he glanced at his reflection in a mirror, fixing up the curl in the ...”

“... around this time, and was invalided home in 1792.) In recognition of the racial crime on which the white man’s Australia is founded, Keneally dedicates The Playmaker ‘To Arabanoo and his brethren, still dispossessed’. Few other novels could carry off the gesture as authoritatively. Keneally anatomises historical Australia by plucking from its origins a ...”

“... with the aim of securing an exclusive contract. She gets more than she bargains for. He stood in white undershorts by a dresser, his chest and legs bare. He stood on a white towel, his feet bare.     Lynn said, ‘Oh, my God –’     She saw his mild expression, his eyes. She saw his hands raised at his ...”

“... The main vehicle for all of this was the Congress for Cultural Freedom, ‘run by CIA agent Michael Josselson from 1950 till 1967’. My first encounter (pun unintended) with the Congress was through The God that Failed, a compendium of confessions by well-known former Communists (and/or sympathisers) that included Gide, Silone and Koestler; it was ...”

“... of shamanism could be integrated into the modern quest for self-actualisation. The anthropologist Michael Harner, who studied and drank ayahuasca with Shipibo-Conibo and Jívaro shamans in the Upper Amazon and taught at Berkeley and elsewhere, boiled his experiences and Eliade’s theories down to a programme he called ‘core shamanism’, which became a ...”

“... humour, neither of them from the narrator’s point of view. The image of the acrobats is from Michael Ondaatje’s Running in the Family, and isn’t, on its first mention in that book, a dream: ‘The doors are twenty feet high, as if awaiting the day when a family of acrobats will walk from room to room, sideways, without dismantling from each other’s ...”

“... as are the arrows      Of that silver sphereWhose intense lamp narrows      In the white dawn clear,Until we hardly see, we feel that it is there.‘I should be grateful for any explanation of this stanza’, Eliot said.Until now I am still ignorant to what sphere Shelley refers, or why it should have silver arrows, or what the devil he means ...”

“... voice in the Wilson and Callaghan years of Labour government, a time not only of the notorious ‘white heat of technology’ but of huge expansion and transformative innovation in higher and further education. Unlike other academic historians, he actually changed the institutions and practices of his country, as well as emitting a cataract of written history ...”

“... who finds a blood clot while changing her baby: ‘what is this thing, startling against the white diaper, like a tiny mouse heart packed in snow?’ The baby is rushed to the hospital (‘Such pleasingly instant service! Just say “blood”. Just say “diaper”. Look what you get!’), where a scan reveals that he has a malignant tumour on his left ...”

“... Inside, under a glass cover, was the embalmed corpse of Ho Chi Minh, two years dead, dressed in a white suit. US troops never found the heavily guarded site, although once, by chance, they landed nearby. A North Vietnamese general told the team from Moscow that if the Americans ever captured the body, Hanoi would be prepared to give all up its US POWs to get ...”