“... the Far West, all coloured in blue on TV. Bush won the South (with Florida coloured in undecided white) and the Plains states, all coloured in red. The Bush camp complained that the Gore challenge to the Florida count might divide the country, but the electoral map shows that it was already split. Indeed, if you swap red for Rebel grey, the map looks like ...”

“... Perhaps without such pressure from outside another solution might have been possible.’ Senator William Borah, chair of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, argued that ‘it would be a national humiliation, a shameless, cowardly compromise of national courage to pay the slightest attention to foreign protests . . . This foreign interference is an ...”

“... British politicians: Michael Gove; Suella Braverman, who proclaimed in her keynote address that ‘white people do not exist in a special state of sin or collective guilt’; Jacob Rees-Mogg, who railed against the state of a country his party has ruled for thirteen years; the backbench MP Miriam Cates, who blamed ‘cultural Marxism’ for declining birth ...”

“... On my little TV, where the picture was jumpy at first, was Jack Kerouac. He was sitting up at a white piano, and Steve Allen tinkled away at the keys. Kerouac is very clean, very neat, but he looks nervous. Allen is smug. He’s a polyester-clad uncle sitting at the piano. ‘You nervous?’ says Allen. ‘Naaah,’ blows Kerouac, and in answer to the next ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... from the eighth century onwards. A 19th-century example of this type of ‘scholarship’ was Sir William Muir’s The Life of Muhammad from Original Sources, first published in 1861, soon after the British brutally suppressed the Great Uprising of 1857 in India, particularly targeting the Muslims among its leaders. The nominal leader of the revolt, the last ...”

“... sat on the terrace one night, Shelleygrasped me violently by the arm and stared steadfastly on the white surf that broke upon the beach under our feet … I demanded of him if he were in pain – but he only answered by saying: ‘There it is again! There!’ … He saw, as plainly as he then saw me, a naked child rise from the sea, and clap its hands as in ...”

“... older and tried hands: proven winners. As a cohort, novelists are MacArthur’s senior citizens. William Gaddis (1982) was awarded a fellowship at the age of 60, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala (1984) at 57, Susan Sontag (1990) at 59, Ernest J. Gaines (1993) at 60. Thomas Pynchon was a relatively young 51 when he won, but by 1988 already the author of his major ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... the prettiest name’), but quickly the images darken. Mangrove roots, ‘when dead’, ‘strew white swamps with skeletons’, and turtles ‘die and leave their barnacled shells on the beaches,/and their large white skulls with round eye-sockets/twice the size of a man’s’. In the poem’s second half, there are ...”

“... that the Hoovers were probably ‘mostly what they said they were’: one of the ‘oldest white families’ in town. Hoover has been well served by previous biographers, but online databases and genealogical tables have enabled Gage to provide the fullest account yet of his early life. Her Hoover had few friends, but was remembered ‘happily running ...”

“... and before those still lodging in the rectory were dispersed, I visited the house by invitation of William Bock, who acted as spokesperson for the collective. Will, as might have been expected under the circumstances, looked pale, convalescent, chilled. He hugged himself under a poncho of blankets, drawing up his legs on the sofa, before he launched into his ...”

“... the assumption that full participation in society required acceptance of the norms set by straight white males. Yet even as the public sphere grew more inclusive, the boundaries of permissible debate were narrowing. Critiques of concentrated power, imperial or plutocratic, became less common. Indeed, the preoccupation with racial and gender identity has ...”

“... the story of his early days in the West, and we flash back to a past which, as the film critic William Pechter observed, ‘to strange effect, is recognisably a set’. Monument Valley as an icon of the frontier was Ford’s creation; no maker of Westerns has done more with the landscape of the West, yet Liberty Valance has very little natural scenery, and ...”

“... Commons dining-room.I play Sillery, now 80, though I can’t say I adjust the acting to the age, a white wig doing most of the work. I am supposed to be entertaining, or being entertained by, a group of young MPs, my only line being: ‘I will mention your name to the Italian Ambassador. I’m dining with him tomorrow night at Diana Cooper’s.’ Most of the ...”