“... or that the Spanish would demand toleration of Catholicism in England to an extent to which Stuart Parliaments would never have assented. Gondomar remained convinced that the religious issue did not matter much because he believed the English people were all eager to return to Catholicism. Once Charles and his ever growing entourage were established in ...”

“... the story. A lad from Liverpool seized black rhythm and blues and transformed it. The sound that white America found too funky for its clean earlobes was re-synthesised by the Beatles and ricocheted out of Matthew Street and the Reeperbahn to recapture Teensville USA. J.W. Lennon, grammar-school dissident and art-school yobbo, used the idiom of rock and roll ...”

“... century encouraged flamboyant, complex carvings, which were then replaced towards the end of the Stuart period with simpler designs: stylised lions to symbolise power and aggression, or torso carvings of mythological or historical figures. During the 18th and early 19th centuries, the production of warship heads for the navy was big business, supporting ...”

“... of the 17th century black slaves gradually replaced indentured servants, and indeed most of the white population. There were also some Indigenous slaves, mostly prisoners from ethnic wars, who were stereotyped by planters as wilful and lazy (English colonists thought the same of the Catholic Irish, but not the Scots, with their Calvinist work ethic). The ...”

“... of intimacy in the imperial ‘contact zone’ undermines the binaries – metropole and colony, white and black, master and slave – on which imperialism depends and is a strategy of post and decolonial thinking. Yet, as Carby knows, the production of the past remains tied to the contingencies of the present, and is limited by them (her description of ...”

“... daughter. So long as the little girl is ‘dressed as the princess’ – Frances has a ‘pair of white gloves for every outfit’ – Ivy can pretend to be a queen. This uncomfortable fantasy finds an echo in Diski’s memoir Skating to Antarctica, which reveals that even when ‘the money, the credit and my father all ran out for good,’ her mother was ...”

“... of poor black Jamaicans burned down the Morant Bay courthouse and killed 18 people, most of them white and one the local chief magistrate, who had just had them fired on by soldiers after a reading of the Riot Act. The governor of the island, Edward Eyre, on the advice of his military commander and his law officers, decreed martial law in the county where ...”

“... Englishman’, welcomed back to ‘his’ country. His wife came, as he did, from an elite white dynasty and his children, though they were born in Jamaica, inherited his birthright. (The children of enslaved women inherited their mothers’ status and were born enslaved.) Long had made enough money from his cane fields and enslaved labour to return ...”

“... the United States. There are obvious historical reasons why this should be so. Until 1776, most white inhabitants of the Thirteen Colonies shared religious and political ideas, patterns of consumerism, trade networks, secular culture, war efforts, as well as a king, with the people across the Atlantic. Consequently, Colonial American historians have long ...”

“... which incorporate verbatim phrases from the street and the news – a literalisation of John Stuart Mill’s claim that poetry is eloquence overheard. Transcription was a pragmatic technique, and a modest one. ‘I was in a state of fascination with the voices of others,’ Notley recalls. ‘I thought as well I probably didn’t have so much to say on ...”

“... was gathering in his twice-daily War Room. Bannon took it as a ‘badge of honour’, according to Stuart Thompson of the New York Times, when the Brookings Institution declared his talk show misinformation superspreader number one. ‘How many followers? How many likes? Retweets? Shares? Views?’ Klein asks. ‘If volume is the name of the game, these ...”

“... peremptory: ‘Eve he supposed had as much sense as I had and she wore no clothes at all!!!’ A white silk dress was duly ordered (Mr C. graciously agreed to pay) and arrived properly ‘high and longsleeved’ and then, ‘on the very day of the ball, was sent back to be cut down to the due pitch of indecency’. Jane’s country-mouse observations on the ...”

“... Europe, but discovered European art in American galleries and museums, and above all in black and white reproductions, which he found in the thousands of art books and periodicals he studied in libraries and later bought. He looked at past and present European painting with an eye for the direct effect of formal strategy. He was unaffected by historical ...”

“... colonies would lead to a dire situation in which ‘the black man will have the whip hand over the white man’; ten years later, the prime minister-in-waiting Margaret Thatcher claimed in a television interview that British people were ‘really rather afraid that this country might be rather swamped by people with a different culture’. A moral panic about ...”

“... Life of LBJ reminds one, is something else again. Whereas British political biography, with the (white) elephantine exception of Martin Gilbert’s Churchill is, almost as a matter of professional pride, a one-volume affair, there is a well established American tradition of monumentalism, based, it seems, on the assumption that a blockbusting person requires ...”