“... accused of having betrayed both his race and his class by having attended Oxford. Had he not been black, his reception might have been worse. By the early Eighties it was clear that Oxford’s best and brightest had found a new home – the Alliance, especially the SDP. Indeed, the SDP was the Oxford party: three of the Gang of Four were Oxford graduates (the ...”

“... first time Vanessa sneaks out of her dorm to spend the night with him, she takes along a black satin nightie she has stolen from her mother’s drawer, but Strane has bought her a pyjama set with strawberries on, which she wears to please him. He lives in a clean and spartan house that he stocks with crisps, ice cream and Cherry Coke. Kate Elizabeth ...”

“... a tumbler for the false teeth she preferred not to wear. An oval mirror hung on a chain and a black and white photograph was pressed into the frame. It was of her husband, Michael, dead for 35 years by then and sorely missed. My education in guilt began there. It was where I first heard the words ‘the bad fire’, a ...”

“... her own ability to control her party and something close to panic as she leads Britain into the black cloud of unknowing that covers Brexit negotiations, the trembling economy and the future of the United Kingdom itself. It’s insecurity, not complacency, which is prompting such Little England deafness and blindness to the outside world. May stowed Boris ...”

“... the Visigoth held Rome to ransom in 408 ad, he demanded, on top of gold, not silk but 3000 lbs of black pepper.Even if most of the East-West trade never went near the supposed route of the Seidenstrasse, the volume of it was still huge. Calculations based on one of those invaluable scraps of papyrus from the rubbish dump at Oxyrhynchus suggest that customs ...”

“... government – an opportunity the Trump campaign declined. Mueller’s most recent arrestee, Michael Flynn, the unhinged Islamophobe who was briefly Trump’s national security adviser, has pleaded guilty to charges of lying to the FBI about meeting the Russian ambassador in December – weeks after the election. This is the sort of backchannel diplomacy ...”

“... assert. For example, in his splendid 1991 study, The Crisis Years: Kennedy and Khrushchev 1960-63, Michael Beschloss demonstrated that Kennedy had been privately relieved by the building of the Berlin Wall, had publicly almost refrained from commenting on it, and had waited until two years after it was safely built before using it as a sound-stage for his Ich ...”

“... In 1995 Michael Howard, the Tory Home Secretary, dismissed Derek Lewis from his post as Director General of the Prison Service and appointed David Ramsbotham Chief Inspector of Prisons. Lewis then wrote a book about his experience – Hidden Agendas: Politics, Law and Disorder (1997) – which reflects very badly on Howard ...”

“... transparent, had arrived at a point where most of their activity was secret and mysterious. Enter Michael Lewis. Flash Boys is a number of things, one of the most important being an exposition of exactly what is going on in the stock market; it’s a one-stop shop for an explanation of high-frequency trading (hereafter, HFT). The book reads like a ...”

“... as long as possible on strict rations. One manual instructed doctors to begin with a diet of black coffee and whiskey, to ‘keep the patient more comfortable while he is being starved’. Calibrated starvation did seem to extend some patients’ lives, but it was uniformly awful and few could adhere to the regimen.Faced with this horror, the pancreas ...”

“... unprecedentedly ‘vicious’ criminal sentences for those convicted, especially when they were black youth. And so, too, with the police, and the courts, and schools and churches and social services, as explored in Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State, and Law and Order (1978), written in collaboration with Chas Critcher, Tony Jefferson, John Clarke and ...”

“... remarkable one, in which Powell pays tribute to the ‘insight’ and ‘courage’ of his fellow Black Country MP John Stonehouse, soon to become postmaster general and then regarded as a coming man in the Labour Party, perhaps even a future leader. Stonehouse had denounced as ‘a canker’ the campaign by local Sikh bus conductors to be allowed to wear ...”

“... of the kings of France, trade routes to Islam, routes of Viking invasions – thus, so, black and white, and not otherwise. What lies behind it all? History of this kind maximises one’s information, minimises doubt. Its authors are pressed into shorthand statements, which often invite one tacitly to assume that things have not changed very much ...”

“... god lives, Gather on willow-ground The blood that was shed, moon-coolness; All roads flow into black decay. Under the golden boughs of the night and stars Sister’s shadow sways through the silent grove, To greet the spirits of the heroes, the bleeding heads; And softly the dark pipes of autumn sound in the reeds. O prouder sorrow! You brazen altars, The ...”

“... called the Violet Quill had formed, and its members – Christopher Cox, Robert Ferro, Michael Grumley, Andrew Holleran, Felice Picano, Edmund White and George Whitmore, together with the film critic Vito Russo and the editor and academic George Stambolian – began producing books whose examination of gay life, though often programmatic, was still ...”