“... In return, you write me Latin tags, stoical philosophy boiled dry. I placed a knife under my white left breast (which you’ve never seen), broke the skin and sent you my heart’s blood on a handkerchief. You always feel sorry for your wife. Think of yourself for a change ... When my body is washed up round the next bend in the river, will that remind ...”

“... but all that seems to happen in this line is that the agent, Richard Strickland, played by Michael Shannon with fabulously nasty relish, tortures him with a cattle prod – and loses two fingers in the process. The creature is referred to as ‘the asset’, indeed ‘the most sensitive asset’ the facility has entertained, but this is wishful ...”

“... burning only his half of the proceeds. The background to this event is an anecdote-cum-fable that Michael Caine, as the faithful servant Alfred, tells Christian Bale as Bruce Wayne. There was a bandit in Burma, apparently, who stole jewels at will from almost everyone and was never caught – because he didn’t want and didn’t keep the jewels, he just ...”

“... song he thinks appropriate to the venue. The song is called ‘Tammy’. The audience, exclusively white, old and rich, is not charmed. A woman leans towards her partner and says: ‘I preferred it when Debbie Reynolds sang it.’The cruelty here has nothing to do with the quality of Cooke’s singing. It lies in Cooke’s failure to understand that an ...”

“... Department. The reviews, reports and other articles are in two categories – ‘yellow’ and ‘white’. ‘Yellow’ is the in-house description of the line taken on all cultural news from capitalist countries (kapstran in Russian Newspeak: Orwell’s ‘Ingsoc’ captures with the precision – and prevision – of genius the Soviet propensity to make ...”

“... has one other important element. The residents at the motel have a discussion about race and how white people routinely subjugate black people. This seems sound enough until one black person pulls out a gun and shoots another to prove his point. There is shock and horror all around, even after the gun turns out to be a starter pistol and the target alive and ...”

“... John MacArthur documents in sickening detail the love affair between the media and the Pentagon/White House during the Gulf War and the months of foreplay that made it possible. (One of the features of what Dan Rather called ‘suck-up coverage’ was that media personnel who participated in it engaged in widespread mea culpas after it was over.) The media ...”

“... our creators, they are our older cousins. The film looks great. The landscapes, mostly grey and white, are full of sombre beauty, and you have no idea how well-endowed the executive suite on an up-to-date spaceship can be – I mean will be. There is an android who makes cups of tea, learns ancient languages and models his diction and appearance on Peter ...”

“... confusion invariably inspires confusion. C.G. Jung, a mind of confused genius, was a hell-send for Michael Tippett, a veritable genius of confusion – who now, celebrating the 75th year of his consistently lively life, inspires sundry confusions in his commentators, and even in those who comment on his commentators: ‘...”

“... this for me,’ the Orange-drink Lemondrink Man said, handing Estha his penis through his soft white two-by-two dhoti. ‘If you could just hold this, I’ll get you your drink. Orange? Lemon?’    Estha held it because he had to. And eventually the little boy’s hand is stickily full of what looks to him like ‘egg ...”

“... feature of the ‘American exceptionalism’ celebrated in the introduction. He identifies white supremacy as another constitutive feature of the United States, one that became ever more pervasive after the Emancipation Proclamation, and one which, according to Evans, white Americans have had more difficulty coming ...”

“... see a woman and two men sitting at a bar, while the unseen speakers make guesses: ‘I think the white guy and the Asian girl are a couple and the Asian guy is her brother’; ‘Or the Asian girl and the Asian guy are a couple, and the white guy is their American friend.’ But their leading refrain is ‘I don’t ...”

“... Past is quietly deliberate, but of course the characters in Proust died of time, not of Aids. White wants to register the disaster, but refuses to memorialise the dead only as victims. The title of the novel, as we learn on one of the last pages, comes from Haydn: ‘I kept thinking of Haydn’s The Farewell Symphony. In the last movement more and more of ...”

“... hopefully entitled it Now you do know, he expresses in his Preface pessimism about whether many white people in Britain will read it, or will believe it if they do. I do not intend in this review to summarise its contents: it is already very compressed, and quickly read. Instead, I will try to remove the principal obstacle to people’s reading it or taking ...”

“... directly and by anagram to the authors of The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail: Richard Leigh and Michael Baigent, who recently sued Brown’s publisher for plagiarism and lost. The third author, Henry Lincoln, didn’t sue. The book itself is mentioned in large capitals, and Teabing comments on it pedantically (‘their fundamental premise is sound’). Of ...”