“... judge who had bent the law on Richard’s orders; Alexander Neville, the archbishop of York; Michael de la Pole, the chancellor; and de Vere, whom Richard had recently named marquess of Dublin and duke of Ireland. All five, along with a widening circle of associates, were convicted of treason by Parliament. Brembre, the only one who dared to appear in ...”

“... Milton Keynes is a direct descendant of Bloomsbury seems about as plausible as trying to show that Michael Foot speaks with the authentic voice of the Levellers. More fundamentally, the central argument of this book, that London’s homely architecture is the product and expression of Londoners’ homely virtues, is chronologically unsound. Most of the ...”

“... days often included professional and business men, but later came to be drawn primarily from the white-collar and lower middle class. The Brigade gave them an unrivalled opportunity for inculcating their highly-prized virtues of personal discipline and self-improvement, and for offering the urban teenage boy something better than a life of street-corner ...”

“... an obscure former one-term governor of Georgia, campaigned almost in secret and ended up in the White House. I come across voters here who have met four or five candidates; voters who have met the same candidate four times; activists who explain how they joined a campaign after hearing a particular candidate years ago. The presentation of the Presidential ...”

“... sentence. Five minutes or so in that pulpit kept me high for days. Yet Obama, brought up by his white mother as a secular humanist, was a stranger to black religion until he went to Chicago in 1984, to take up a job as a trainee community organiser. His boss prepped him at his interview in New York: ‘If poor and working-class people want to build real ...”

“... In October​ 1961, John F. Kennedy and the entire White House press corps decamped to Fort Bragg, North Carolina, to watch US airborne forces put on a show of power. It was the president’s first foray out of the Boston-Washington DC corridor to ‘meet the people’, and in his acerbic book The Best and the Brightest, published a decade later, David Halberstam described it as ‘a real whizbang day ...”

“... outrageous from whatever angle you approach it – is a cartoon dramatisation of both white racism and white anxiety about race. Berryman’s sessions with Shea, as well as the voluminous dream-analysis diaries that the sessions spawned, led him to experiment with poetic narratives and idioms, from the infantile ...”

“... in 1988, was a dress rehearsal for the Third Way politics that would send Bill Clinton to the White House four years later. Its failure is usually attributed to Biden’s lifting of passages from a speech by Neil Kinnock about his working-class upbringing, but in fact he was following his mother’s advice when he dropped out. ‘The wounded, limping ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Di and Dodi on their wedding day that never was. The couple are shown hand in hand: she in a white bridal gown, clutching a bouquet; he in a dark morning-suit with a carnation in his buttonhole. They both seem very happy – or, shall we say, they don’t in the least seem to mind having their heads mounted on some other couple’s torsos. Di might not ...”

“... its total commitment to free trade and institute a system of imperial protection. Britain and its (white) colonies would be organised into a mutually reinforcing and enriching economic bloc, finally capable of standing up to their international competitors (which had long since put up their own tariffs while ruthlessly exploiting Britain’s openness and good ...”

“... other three – the barely tolerated ones – were Golo, born in 1909, Monika, born in 1910, and Michael, born in 1919. Erika remembered a time during the shortages of the First World War when food had to be divided but there was one fig left over. ‘What did my father do? He gave this fig just to me alone . . . the other three children stared in ...”

“... she favoured black silk cloaks and trousers, tricorn hats, blood-red lipstick and cadaverish white face-powder – Tallulah Bankhead was not the only acquaintance to nickname her ‘Countess Dracula’. Yet such was de Acosta’s sinister allure she managed to bed just about everybody who was anybody in the sapphic world of her time: from Isadora ...”

“... of sulphate aerosols in Greenland ice cores fell in the 1990s.A British scientist, Professor Michael Grubb of Imperial College, London, first suggested that these two unlikely successes might become the models for a worldwide assault on global warming. Guilty gases could be identified, targets and times negotiated for their reduction, and nations coming ...”

“... at school, a jersey and skirt at training college, ‘my schizophrenic fancy dress’, a ‘white smock, white shoes and a starched cap’, things made of weird new fabrics such as ‘everglaze’, a longed-for skirt of ‘terylene’ with permanent pleats, a ‘dull green overcoat’, the slacks Sargeson preferred ...”