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“... of touch’ (yeah) I am, will lose my seat, SDP wave of the future, usual balls. Actually, little White (Ambassador to Chile) isn’t so bad. A bit guarded, but that’s probably down to the secret FCO biog. which precedes me at all destinations. I am not getting on with his wife though. There is this certain type of woman who simultaneously demands that you ...”

“... Some of the men who incited the riots in Notting Hill in 1958 were placed in them – those young white men known as Teddy Boys. The riots were the inspiration for Oswald Mosley to run as a candidate for North Kensington in the 1959 general election, and he spoke during the campaign about the repatriation of the West Indians living in Notting Hill. He lost ...”

“... of Constable that flatters posterity by seeming to point to Post-Impressionism and abstraction. Kenneth Clark also thought that the sketches had a ‘force of sensation’, but found the finished oils a ‘bore’. John Berger took the opposite view, that the completed works were rich in brilliant light effects, but the sketches were weakened by vague ...”

“... that she wavered for some time between writing a personal memoir of her 16 years with her husband Kenneth and embarking on a full-dress biography, embracing the 36 before they met. As she foresaw, making the second choice has produced an odd, hybrid book, not quite one thing nor the other. At times deeply intimate, at others coolly dispassionate, her ...”

“... People like to imagine the scene and to hear the story that led up to it over and over again. Kenneth MacMillan began his ballet Mayerling with a prologue tableau of the end: black figures with umbrellas stand and watch the snow falling into Maria Vetsera’s open grave. The snow falls at Astopovo too, where Anne Edwards sets her prologue and shows us ...”

“... as a Modernist, or at least as an important source for Modernism, was most carefully made by Kenneth Clark in the Sixties, a decade which saw its own ‘Beardsley boom’, a popular revival which accompanied op art, Beaton’s Ascot, Yellow Submarine and Performance. Clark described the drawings from Salome as ‘hard-edged abstraction’ and ...”

“... non-resignations can in many ways be as disgraceful as resignations. The leading figure here is Kenneth Baker, who perfected a theory about why he should slay as Home Secretary despite the succession of calamities that surrounded him, until he was eventually jettisoned by the Prime Minister after the 1992 election. Holding steadfastly to the view that ...”

“... see this country as a testing-ground where the difficulties of assimilation associated with non-white immigration first occurred and where their solutions could be attempted. If mere passage of time were to be associated with increased inter-racial tolerance, Britain might be expected to have moved further along this path than other countries in Western ...”

“... people, although with Betjeman perhaps the stains stand out more, in a public life of proverbial white-suited and baggy-trousered gentility. So, to deal first with the inevitable mess and dirt. At the beginning of the book, in 1933, within a year of his marriage to Penelope Chetwode, Betjeman is having an affair with their housegirl. He continued to have ...”

“... was endlessly reiterated, Africans sold other Africans into slavery, as if this somehow obviated white America’s responsibility for creating the most powerful slave system the world has known. Probably the most popular film among white Americans remains Gone with the Wind (re-released last summer with great fanfare), in ...”

“... convicts after they had been sentenced. Indeed, this book and a series of excellent articles by Kenneth Morgan should become mandatory reading for those who imagine that privatisation might represent an improvement over a state-run penal system. The British government negotiated contracts with merchants who specialised in the convict trade. It was a ...”

“... World, which she made in 1963, the panels are green. This time Marilyn steps out boldly, wearing white fur. ‘The Only Blonde in the World’ (1963) In the summer of 1963 Boty met Clive Goodwin, a literary agent and radical of the New Left, later one of the founders of Black Dwarf. Boty had been having an affair with a married director, Philip ...”

“... first moved to a one-member-one-vote system in 2001, they plumped for Iain Duncan Smith over Kenneth Clarke. The result was that Britain had a weak and ineffectual parliamentary opposition at the most hubristic phase of Tony Blair’s premiership, during the run-up to the Iraq War. The situation was only remedied two years later when the parliamentary ...”

“... independence in Africa was more or less complete by the mid-1960s. Decolonisation had lifted the white man’s burden and allowed African activists to strike out on their own – with a ceremonial nod to their European benefactors. But if this characterisation was absurd, so was the notion that colonial rule in Africa was an anomaly by the 1970s: millions of ...”

“... but also draws attention to the fact that they fail to interest his interlocutor, a ‘spectacled white man sitting with a broad census-taker’s portfolio’. The census-taker quickly runs through his list of questions and then departs the story as, in a rather different way, does the man whose name, age, occupation and family background he records: Samuel ...”