“... Atlantic. In the 19th century Offenbach was French, Strauss was Austrian. Even in the 20th century Irving Berlin was American, and in Jewish-controlled Hollywood of the great period you will search in vain for anything other than what Zukor and Loew and Mayer considered 100 per cent white American values, or even for stars whose names hinted at immigrant ...”

“... the horror, hence no guilt about it, and so his revulsion from it is manageable. He is nearer to David Jones; one ‘soldiers on’. His revulsion and protest come later, when post-war England makes light of its soldiers’ sacrifices: ‘How England should take as common their vast endurance/ And let them be but boys having served time overseas.’ As ...”

“... limited’. By that time, Oborne also had access to the memo of 14 March 2002 by Sir David Manning, Blair’s foreign policy adviser, reporting to his boss on his conversations with Condoleezza Rice: ‘I said that you would not budge in your support for regime change but you had to manage a press, a Parliament and a public opinion that was very ...”

“... ask these things, of course. The tone is judicious, though an outburst of ritual name-calling from David Jordan belies the subtlety of his longer study, The Revolutionary Career of Maximilien Robespierre. For him, Robespierre is ‘unworldly, resentful, vain, egotistical, susceptible to flattery, contemptuous of or indifferent to all the social pleasures ...”

“... of the studio process to oversee budgets, schedules and scripts. In Hollywood’s Golden Age, Irving Thalberg is held up by all as the epitome of the creative producer, a man of taste and collaborative skill, whose model of excellence has long since vanished from the movie-making scene. ‘No profession of producer really exists today,’ Billy Wilder ...”

“... him as ‘quite miserable-looking … so thin, so little, so miserable’. The art critic David Bourdon thought his art collection ‘stank’ and took the view that Warhol was nothing more than ‘a window trimmer and chichi East Side gadabout who hung around with trashy people’. In the world of commercial art, as photography began to overtake ...”

“... of white women.’Black feminists weren’t the only ones to take offence. In 1986 the novelist David Bradley confessed that the first time he read Native Son,I shed no tears for Bigger. I wanted him dead; by legal means if possible, by lynching if necessary … I did not see Bigger Thomas as a symbol of any kind of black man. To me he was a sociopath, pure ...”