“... Glasgow. Some bought Union flags from hawkers; most had brought their own. Women dressed in red, white and blue sang ‘you can stuff your independence up your arse.’ Expensive cars disgorged burly men from Ayrshire and Fife. A Rangers banner was attached to the metal railings in front of the cenotaph. Sections of the crowd chanted ‘Rule Britannia’ and ...”

“... to the other, from cool, cruel blue to Townshend’s three-minute psychodrama – ‘I look all white/but my dad was black’ – was the brief, paradoxical flare of Mod: the story of how a small cabal of British jazz obsessives conducting a besotted affair with the style arcana of Europe and America somehow became an army of scooter-borne rock fans, draped ...”

“... a better life like the other tribes in Sarawak … Stop being arrogant and thinking that it is the white man’s burden to decide the fate of the peoples in this world. As the American journalist Carl Hoffman writes in his dual biography of Manser and the American collector of Dayak art Michael Palmieri, ‘Bruno, in essence, wanted to stop time.’ He ...”

“... Street, two hundred girls turned out in their night attire into the winter cold. Her face was white, her eyes were staring; she whispered: ‘I put him in the wardrobe.’The expense of travelling, the logistical manoeuvres required, the wear and tear on the nerves, meant that the visits had to be well spaced out. And gradually, I realised that my world ...”

“... black scholar’s robe, looks gloomily out at the viewer, the long hair of his face draped over a white ruff, while behind him looms the entrance to a cave, a reference to the traditional dwellings of the Guanches. Maddalena – about seven or eight – wears a gold brocade gown worthy of a princess, encrusted with pearls and precious stones, a large jewelled ...”

“... to catch some telltale sign of intelligence chiming in at the special frequency. He heard mostly white noise; one heart-thumping squawk, he later realised, came not from the sky but from a top-secret military installation nearby. Not easily discouraged, he attracted colleagues to the topic, and SETI was underway. Cocconi and Morrison’s Nature article makes ...”

“... islet is crammed with men: Chief Vorstenbosch, Deputy Melchior van Cleef, Dr Marinus, Senior Clerk Peter Fischer, Junior Clerk Ponke Ouwehand, Arie Grote, Piet Baert, Ivo Oost, Wybo Gerritszoon. Their conversation is as cacophonous as their names. For instance: ‘most of us hands gather of an evenin’ in my humble billet, eh, for a little hazard ...”

“... Terror gave way to bored misery; moral absolutism to irony. Things stopped looking so black and white. In The Zone, Dovlatov maintains a deadpan tone, without a trace of melodrama. The writer-narrator tells his editor: I am interested in life and not in prison, and in people, not monsters. And I absolutely do not want to be known as the modern-day Virgil ...”

“... of the kind of school I attended but mainly because Britain’s postwar economy created so many white collar jobs in the public and service sectors that it required no unusual ability or hard work or overwhelming ambition to fill one of them: they sucked us in like a sponge. That was the pull factor. Pushing us was something we heard our fathers ...”

“... sense, a mark impressed, engraved or otherwise made on a surface: a brand or stamp or cut. Peter Simon’s engraving of Fuseli’s ‘The Enchanted Island Before the Cell of Prospero’ for Boydell’s Shakespeare Gallery (1797). The Compleat Drawing-Book is an example of the kind of educational artistic guide that flourished in the 18th century. The ...”

“... this is one thing we know for sure – we will be absent; a nationalist, nativist anxiety that (white) English kids will lose their identity when they are forced to become cosmopolitan citizens of the world (and therefore ‘citizens of nowhere’ as Theresa May would say); a theological fear that the children of God are becoming lost in the secular void ...”

“... as one resistance movement achieves some success, others take heart. Because of Algeria’s large white population the French hoped to retain their colony there after Tunisia and Morocco had won their independence: the ferocious Algerian war of independence was the result. The British fondly imagined that they would still be running Africa decades after India ...”

“... Government of Vietnam to permit him a relay station.) Until Saddam’s ruffians cut off the line, Peter Arnett, the intrepid New Zealander who must now be the world’s senior war correspondent, was providing actuality from Baghdad. I once met Arnett and was fascinated to learn that it had been he, interviewing the American officer in charge of the Ben Tre ...”

“... with workaday portraits of 15th-century life and death. Aridjis’s narrator tends to move as Peter Greenaway’s camera, sideways rather than in and out. We are, it seems, to take at face value most of what this picaro tells us, as if his theme is too important for us to be left in any doubt over something as trifling and ‘literary’ as whether or not ...”

“... with? If a musician listening to a tape can tell whether the fingers on the keys are black or white, should one tremble to acknowledge that the live voice, instantly distinguishable as male or female, leaves its imprint on the page? Russian is a language in which, given the laws of grammatical concordance, the lyrical ‘I’ must declare its gender all ...”