“... sort of plot and the two men were buried alongside each other and their graves marked by plain white marble slabs bearing just their names and dates. Family photographs show both graves strewn with wreaths and flowers and Alfred’s headstone has an ornate wire frame fixed behind it, covered with more flowers. Amelia and Albert were the only mourners at ...”

“... first novel, The Swimming Pool Library (1988), is set during the summer of 1983. The narrator, William Beckwith, is a young aristocrat of leisure. He lives in Holland Park, swims at the Corinthian Club, a gay gym on Great Russell Street (‘the masterpiece of the architect Frank Orme, whom I once met at my grandfather’s’), and picks up men ...”

“... In Arthur Schlesinger’s court history, A Thousand Days: John F. Kennedy in the White House, which might without unfairness be called the founding breviary of the cult of JFK, there appears the following vignette. Schlesinger had been asked to carpenter a ‘White Paper’ justifying Washington’s destabilisation of Cuba, in which the high-flown rhetoric of the New Frontier might form a sort of scab over the fouler business of empire ...”

“... shops closed as the demonstrators had requested and several local factories with mixed or majority white workforces voted to strike. Central Southall was now under the control of several thousand police officers, who set up cordons around the town hall. By 3 p.m. there were already several hundred local residents stuck outside the cordons, and not allowed to ...”

“... especially in its opening stages, to the facts and testimony and rumours gathered up by Timothy White, an American music journalist who periodically updated his 1983 biography of Marley, Catch a Fire, until his death in 2002. The characters are all freely imagined even when they’re filling the roles of real people, with the exception of Marley, who’s ...”

“... faces south of the river for regular bits of business, cash drops. These heavy suits would sit, white-knuckled, fingers digging into the scarlet leather, until they made it safely home to Poplar. They piled into the nearest boozer and pitched back the doubles until they could lift a shot glass without spilling half of its contents. The ride to the tunnel ...”

“... definition, neither system totally erased the legacy of the Civil War. For well over a century white Southerners identified the Republicans as the party of Abraham Lincoln and rejected these Northern meddlers at the polls. In 1950 the Republicans had no senators from the South and only a couple of congressmen. Conversely, some blacks continued to ...”

“... about abstraction. He joined a London exhibiting group headed by Ben Nicholson, whose pure white reliefs were the nearest indigenous parallel to the work of Continental avantgardists such as Mondrian, and devised his own handsomely workmanlike ‘Constructions’. In 1935 Piper’s girlfriend Myfanwy Evans launched Axis, a review of ...”

“... was a regular user of arsenic for aphrodisiac purposes and had told a witness that he took the white powder for ‘longevity and a fair complexion, my boy’. Female public opinion was outraged and Maybrick’s sentence was commuted to hard labour for life. Eventually, the case came to be known as ‘the English Dreyfus affair’; she was freed but not ...”

“... Likenesses at the Royal West of England Academy. Many poets and writers are in the exhibition: William Empson, Seamus Heaney, Charles Tomlinson, Salman Rushdie, Robert Lowell, Geoffrey Hill. The only other bare feet besides Walcott’s belong to a corpse on a dissecting table in front of Keith Simpson, the forensic pathologist. An illegible name-tag is ...”

“... Cuban citizens needed official permission, in the form of the so-called tarjeta blanca, the ‘white card’, to travel abroad. It wasn’t as restrictive as is often claimed. Between 2000 and 2012, 99.4 per cent of applications for the white card were approved, and 941,953 Cubans travelled abroad: 12 per cent chose not ...”

“... they powered Thomas Malory’s 15th-century Morte D’Arthur, created the Victorian vogue for William Morris’s ‘Defence of Guenevere’ (1858) and Tennyson’s Idylls of the King (1859-85), and returned in T.H. White’s Once and Future King (1958) and the Disney movie based on it in 1963, with a dozen successors ...”

“... Life of LBJ reminds one, is something else again. Whereas British political biography, with the (white) elephantine exception of Martin Gilbert’s Churchill is, almost as a matter of professional pride, a one-volume affair, there is a well established American tradition of monumentalism, based, it seems, on the assumption that a blockbusting person requires ...”

“... a phthalo green so fucking intense that just a teardrop of this stuff could colonise a blob of white. Michael Boone’s father was a butcher in the small town of Bacchus Marsh near Melbourne – hence his son’s moniker – and Michael is a provincial rebel, determined to remind the metropolis of his raggedness. In Bacchus Marsh, a German art teacher ...”

“... soon took up with the British security services too. The head of Scotland Yard’s Special Branch, William Melville, worked closely with the Okhrana’s top man in Paris, Petr Ivanovich Rachkovsky, whose many state-sanctioned crimes probably included overseeing the creation of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Morris thinks Melville wasn’t to know about ...”