“... and even themselves. First and most obviously, the great divide separates the rich from the poor, white from black, those with tolerable food, clothing and shelter from the underclass guests at the Tabernacle Soup Kitchen. Second, the mass choice of private security over public amenities, as recounted in Terkel’s interviews, atomises neighbourhoods and ...”

“... and I came across the local racecourse. She would put the dog on its lead and I would approach the white rails where the horses – with their mad eyes, soft telescopic nostrils, bulging veins and bony legs – were being restrained in front of the nooses stretched across the track by tense, hunched dwarfs in brilliant silks who abused each other with words I ...”

“... In Arthur Schlesinger’s court history, A Thousand Days: John F. Kennedy in the White House, which might without unfairness be called the founding breviary of the cult of JFK, there appears the following vignette. Schlesinger had been asked to carpenter a ‘White Paper’ justifying Washington’s destabilisation of Cuba, in which the high-flown rhetoric of the New Frontier might form a sort of scab over the fouler business of empire ...”

“... for you; and awe, if not also envy, of the almost impossible beauty of these men – all of them white men – shown naked on the page. Self-portrait for the ‘Don’t Touch Here’ exhibition announcement by Robert Mapplethorpe (1973) If you were also very shy, as Robert Mapplethorpe was (born in 1946, he was in the 1960s still a very young artist ...”

“... home, left each other too, ‘their lives splitting as evenly as their shared egg. Stella became white and Desiree married the darkest man she could find.’Desiree’s return is only half of a return, and the story, like a Shakespearean Romance, or a weepie, is headed towards bringing both girls back home, as well as recalling the reasons they wanted to ...”

“... like trying to make this film.’ Getting to work on the film, wresting it from the hands of the white director Norman Jewison, persuading Warner Brothers that it needed to be as long as it is, that the scenes of Malcolm’s pilgrimage to Egypt and Mecca had to be shot on location, all this is a version of Malcolm’s struggle on behalf of the blacks; maybe ...”

“... which starts as a satire about the search for authenticity, develops into a ghost story about white visions of black music. White Tears begins in New York in the recent past, and spirals back to the South, first in the late 1950s, then finally thirty years before that. Thematically, it culminates in the forced labour of ...”

“... consults some friends. One of them finds the notion of freedom patriarchal; ‘That’s a white word,’ another says. This prevarication continues for many pages.Nelson explores the concept of freedom, or care, in four ‘songs’, otherwise known as essays. Their subjects are, broadly speaking, art, sex, drugs and climate change. She avoids lyrical ...”

“... on account of its lavish illustrations, I come across a note of when Mary-Kay and her children, Sam and Will, came round to supper. ‘William in particular is very polite, manfully tackling a stew which he doesn’t like and finishing it. “Thank you very much,” he says as he gets up. “I actually prefer my vegetables raw.” He also talks of Leonora ...”

“... coach as it circled the roundabout. Along one stretch of its window, near the back, three pairs of white buttocks were pressed to the glass like a row of supermarket chicken breasts. A car came past and the driver sounded his horn.’ A Natural is a novel about male bodies and male bonding. The word ‘banter’ features regularly: ‘Brilliant banter,’ the ...”

“... Howard Hunt, a former CIA agent who was employed as a consultant on special activities at the White House. Evidence soon pointed to the other accomplice at the lookout, Gordon Liddy, legal counsel to CREEP. The situation was complicated, because in some respects the Nixon administration was investigating itself. The FBI was a division of the Justice ...”

“... to believe that she has inherited psychic energies, the protective and regenerative powers of a white witch. The poet Edwin Parsler sees in Lisa the embodiment of his Muse, the joyous and angry goddess who awakens him to creative life. All have a conviction of spirituality. ‘There’s something else out there,’ Lisa tells Edwin at the close of the ...”

“... life by Sir Arthur Bryant had done much to rescue him from his popular reputation of Slippery Sam, ‘Old Peepy’, a mixture of Charles Pooler and Paul Pry, a natural target for clerihews (‘Sam Pepys, Gives one the crepys’) and the wags of 1066 and All That. If the diary had been seized and burned by the hangman ...”

“... describes at some length his fantasy of being alone with her on a Caribbean island, she wearing a white see-through dress with nothing underneath. The talk of erectile tissue prompts Malcolm to quote Lord Rochester, which leads to an argument with Lady Antonia about whether or not Rochester is ‘porno’ – Malcolm’s word – during which the New ...”

“... 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 ...”