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“... certainty’. Some even saw in its climate of extremes the foundations of a higher civilisation. William Cronon, in his magisterial book Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West, refers to Alexander von Humboldt’s theory that great cities were possible only in regions with an average annual isotherm of about 50° F, and explains that ‘the ...”

“... he strode into the building and claimed the job, introducing himself as all-American ‘Harry White’. In his time off from the tie factory, Harry’s taste for magic grew into an obsession; and once the rest of his family had joined him in New York, he and his younger brother, Theo, nicknamed Dash, started working on an act together. Harry was ...”

“... worked but would destroy him if it went wrong; then by secretly recording his conversations in the White House in the hope of storing up material to use against his opponents but in fact only providing evidence of his own malfeasance. Nixon belongs to a type well known in horse-racing, who would actually prefer to win a race by crooked means. He was, in that ...”

“... chiefly fell’. His book on Andrew Jackson tried to explain why he was not simply the champion of white frontiersmen (one reason his portrait is back up in the Trump White House), but, more important, fought on behalf of downtrodden men in the eastern cities against a National Bank that had been captured by the financial ...”

“... of the anti-conformist, soon-to-be-hippy generation. It is of course an analysis solely of the white world; Erikson’s interest in American blacks came later. The time was ripe for all this. The pool of patients (including himself) from which Freud drew his theories may have been neurotic or traumatised, but most came from an established Jewish-bourgeois ...”

“... A publisher’s note explains that when William Golding died he had written two drafts of this novel, and was about to begin a third. The signs are that this might have been longer than the second, but not substantially different. Some necessary editing has been done, on the basis of notes made by Golding in his journal, and there is a page of typescript missing in the middle of the book ...”

“... all the young queen had more in common with her unpopular and self-indulgent uncles George IV and William IV than the fresh-faced appearance and the famous promise to ‘be good’ suggested. Courtiers and Victoria herself recorded tearful scenes and door slamming on her part and implacable calm, or the appearance of it, on Albert’s. Once he locked himself ...”

“... the big imperial powers. The mutiny on the Bounty ruined a mission in imperial botany: Lieutenant William Bligh’s task had been to secure breadfruit trees from Tahiti, then carry them to the Caribbean to provide cheap food for slaves on the sugar-cane plantations. (The trees got to the Caribbean on a second Royal Navy breadfruit voyage in 1793.) The theory ...”

“... after the night of 14-15 April 1912 about the ‘good press’ the story was receiving. The white spaces and big lettering of newspapers had, he thought, ‘an incongruously festive air’, with ‘a disagreeable effect of feverish exploitation of a sensational Godsend’. Even before the ship sank it seemed as if the century of progress was pregnant ...”

“... European women, while declaring their own women off-limits to European men. Breivik and his fellow white Norwegians were ‘first-generation dhimmis’ – a term for non-Muslim minorities under Ottoman rule which, like most of his ideas, he’d found online – in what was fast becoming ‘Eurabia’. Worst of all, Europe’s ‘cultural Marxist’ elites had ...”

“... industrialists formed to press for anti-missile defences. When the group assembled at the White House in September 1981, he held out a grand vision of ‘assured survival’ in a nuclear war and began the process of aggressively selling the virtues of a nuclear bomb-pumped X-ray laser then in the very early research stages at Livermore. On the evening ...”

“... steps above; there are amazing blue night-time exteriors that contrast strongly with the black-and-white indoors. But we are also seeing a clunky old silent thriller, with terrible acting and gestures of sinister foreshadowing that make The Cabinet of Dr Caligari look like a model of cinematic understatement. This might be a matter of then and now, or what we ...”

“... either by silence, rehab, cameo appearances, adverts, jail or, if they’re lucky, B-movies. William Friedkin made The French Connection and The Exorcist and was nominated for several Oscars before climbing to the top of his personal godhead and leaping off. Last year he directed Episode 9 in the eighth season of the TV show CSI: Crime Scene ...”

“... Kenya’s​ government is in crisis. In May, President William Ruto introduced a controversial new finance bill, which proposed higher duties on basic goods such as bread, vegetable oil and sugar, as well as an ‘eco-levy’ that would drive up the cost of sanitary towels and other items. Ruto said the taxes would raise a much needed additional £2 billion in government revenues ...”

“... a fire was in my head, And cut and peeled a hazel wand, And hooked a berry to a thread; And when white moths were on the wing, And moth-like stars were flickering out, I dropped the berry in a stream And caught a little silver trout. If the trout is a poem, the wand is knowledge of the land and people: it’s beautiful and apparently artlessly simple, but ...”