“... Confessions of Nat Turner, as racist and perverted, Genovese carried on a spirited defence of the white author from Virginia and his right to make artistic excursions into history. His next book, The World the Slaveholders Made (1969), moved him further along the right-veering road, with a critique of the maverick George Fitzhugh’s pro-slavery ...”

“... between Waco, hard-right militia groups and conspiracist media outfits is easily made. The white supremacist Timothy McVeigh travelled to Waco during the siege and was outraged by what happened. He blew up the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City in 1995 on the second anniversary of the fire, killing 168 people. The far-right radio show ...”

“... cinema – is himself a historical monument ‘condensing into a single figure the structures of white supremacist racial integration that built the United States: black labour in the realm of production, inter-racial nurture and sex (the latter as both a private practice and unifying public prohibition) in the realm of reproduction, and blackface minstrelsy ...”

“... night? He was absolutely normal, what data could be extracted from him?The sterile room, the white sheet, the scalpel – I couldn’t picture anyone picturing himself there. Then in Season Two Duane Barry appears in his eloquent T-shirt and his face is the face of absolute belief. A scar over his right eye, where he was shot in 1982 (the bullet pierced ...”

“... firm Measures that make his Nato allies squirm. Snow falls again. The atmosphere turns white. The airfields of East Anglia are socked in. The atom bombers will not fly tonight. Tonight the Third World War will not begin. There’s so much concentrated heat and light Stored around here that if they pulled the pin The British Isles would be ...”

“... Court Road turnpike during the Jacobite Rebellion of 1745: the guards, in their red coats and white spatterdashes, have gathered ahead of the march to Finchley Common. Drunken grenadiers fondle milkmaids and pilfer pies, prostitutes hang out of the windows of the tavern. In the midst of the chaos, a heavily pregnant ballad-seller bids farewell to her ...”

“... judgment’. The new theology, completed under visionary inspiration by Ellen White, took the Seventh-Day Adventists down the path from Pre- to Post-Millennialism trodden by other millenarian movements such as the Mormons. Since Christ would not come down until humanity cleaned up its act, people had first to purify themselves, spiritually ...”

“... was a traitor to the socialist cause: by no stretch of the imagination could she be said to be a White agent. The squalor of Moscow has remained a constant, both in spite and because of the huge building programmes which expanded the city from its relatively small dimensions before the Fifties to its present sprawl. The programmes of the Moscow first ...”

“... question, further irritated the teacher, who, her hands powdered with sediments of green and white chalk, wanted to be upstairs in the teachers’ common room, pouring tea from her cup into her saucer and very slowly sipping it. Preparing, like Atlas, to lift a tottering load of brown-paper-covered exercise books full of long, ingenious ...”

“... Corporation was to be found not in Walt’s skyscrapers and monorails, but in a long-lost past of white picket fences and pastel dormer windows, so lost that perhaps it was entirely mythic: There was once a place where neighbours greeted neighbours in the quiet of summer twilight. Where children chased fireflies. And porch swings provided easy refuge from ...”

“... when he visited Oxford, for this sort of anxious communitarianism is heavily represented among his White House staff. In the early days of his Presidency, Mrs Clinton was mocked for her rather clumsy support of the ‘politics of meaning’, but community-building remains one of the Administration’s themes. Indeed, Clinton’s standing as a ‘new ...”

“... in 1945, Kelly choreographed and starred in Anchors Aweigh, which became famous for his dance with Jerry Mouse; in it he also becomes the idol of a little boy who wants to join the Navy, and he dances around a fountain with a young girl made up to look Mexican. This dance was particularly hard to rehearse because Stanley Donen (then Kelly’s assistant, later ...”

“... country squire was the one that he’d settled on. In 1966, he began to cross over in earnest with white audiences. That spring, Redding played a series of shows at the Whisky a Go Go in Los Angeles. On the first night, Bob Dylan turned up with an advance pressing of ‘Just Like a Woman’, which he hoped Redding would cover. (‘I like it but it’s got too ...”

“... we imagine between her face and her mask.’ The images of Doris Day (that blonde hair, those white teeth) and her personas as the spunky girl next door, the tightly wound career woman and the gung-ho housewife have been fixed for years now, but the person who played Doris Day is less clear. It’s difficult even to know what to call her. The band leader ...”

“... and required reading in schools, and Miller ... well, as a friend of mine who eats lunch at the White House mess tells me, a Republican campaign worker recently calculated the voter mileage in awarding the mesmerising techno-thriller author Tom Clancy a grant from the National Endowment in this election year. The ...”