“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... the economy rather than balancing the government’s books. The canonical text was the Employment White Paper of 1944, and behind that – invoked with a vague but emphatic air of piety – was the ghost of Keynes. Common sense now said that mass unemployment had been abolished, that a little inflation was a price well worth paying, and that any government ...”

“... the project’s managers and engineers. The design team established themselves in Lincoln at the White Hart and set to work with Foster & Co, Engineers and Boilermakers. After a series of revisions were made by Wilson, the first armoured box (known affectionately as ‘Little Willie’) finally waddled round the factory on 6 September. Unfortunately, it ...”

“... photographic plate, as Holmes suggests, she would see the road to Camelot as a series of black and white exposures, not the moving and coloured pictures that so entrance her. I also doubt whether the arch of experience in ‘Ulysses’, ‘where through/Gleams that untravelled world whose margin fades/For ever’ derives from Newton’s analysis of the rainbow ...”

“... 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 ...”