“... she has painted a boy with a face of conspicuous sweetness, gentle and shy: a black coat, white cuffs falling over those exquisite, boneless, long-fingered hands that only portrait painters have ever seen. In the posed portraits, he is always smiling: faintly, perhaps; impatiently, perhaps. Then there is a sketch taken from life, 1793, in the National ...”

“... sense, though, Edinburgh did adopt him. His talents took him to the Royal High School, where William Drummond, Henry Mackenzie and Walter Scott had been before him. There Karl became favourite pupil and close friend of Hector MacIver, that incomparable teacher of literature, who recognised his gifts and took him with his other clever boys down the Calton ...”

“... of a brutally divided nation, as divided as it has been at any point in its recent history. Among white voters, who still account for 72 per cent of the total, Romney won the popular vote by a margin of 59 per cent to 39 per cent, a Reaganesque landslide. Men voted in large numbers for Romney; women in even larger numbers for Obama (more women actually ...”

“... ideas from his communist and left-wing rivals: clean-up campaigns, anti-corruption purges and the white short-sleeved uniforms that were meant to convey the PAP’s purity. Meanwhile, his ‘Asian Values’ campaign and his 1980s eugenics programme – one of the few initiatives his citizens rejected – owe debts to Japanese fascism, and the PAP’s ...”

“... the ‘negation of exile’ but also, and paradoxically, to reinvent themselves as citizens of the white West – in Herzl’s words, as a ‘rampart of Europe against Asia’. Brit Shalom’s vision of reconciliation and co-operation with the indigenous population was unthinkable to most Zionists, because they regarded the Arabs of Palestine as squatters on ...”

“... would a President who made law and order one of his principal planks explain on TV that senior White House staff were authorising burglary? As for his alleged ignorance, even Nixon accepted some responsibility for the break-in at the office of Daniel Ellsberg’s psychoanalyst after Ellsberg had embarrassed the Administration with the leaking of the ...”

“... from Kipling ironising in indulgent prose. When in India, he had visualised Parnellites such as William O’Brien and T.P. O’Connor as figures of fun: not now. The real force of the poem lay in a quality alien to the interests of Henley and Fitzroy Bell. When Fitzroy Bell saw it, ‘Cleared’ was in the Irish dialect Kipling used for his Irish soldiers ...”

“... Belchamber has no taste for games, girls or money; in his new introduction to the novel, Edmund White calls him a ‘sissy’, which is about right, though, oddly, Cissy is the name of the pitiless young woman Sainty is trapped into marrying. Sturgis never makes any play on this lurking pun, though as a treacherous and neglectful wife Cissy is a constant ...”

“... when an apparent suicide pilot crashed a single-engined Cessna airplane on the south lawn of the White House in 1994, jokers suggested it might be the CIA director trying to get an appointment with the president. The anti-Communist revolt that began at Herat in western Afghanistan in March 1979 originated in a government initiative to teach girls to ...”

“... William Ewart Gladstone​ , four times prime minister of Great Britain and Ireland, died of a cancer of the palate on the 19th of May 1898. Ascension Day. It was fitting, Bill’s father said, for a Christian gentleman. It was at moments like these, he thought, when you could detect a pattern in the world. Now they were travelling to stand with the crowds and bear witness at Mr Gladstone’s funeral ...”

“... trips back down the path. Across the road her companion waits, a solid middle-aged man with bright white hair and glasses, a sports outfitter perhaps, the secretary of a golf club, even chairman of the parish council, though there is something slightly seedy or lavatorial about him but nothing to suggest he is a reporter or a photographer on the Daily ...”

“... It’s not difficult to guess where they’re making for: their new gallery, Jay Jopling’s White Cube2 in Hoxton Square. You don’t really need to go inside the sugar-frosted box to see what’s happening. You can get it from the street. This is top dollar, scratchcard art. Either it works in one hit or forget it. If it doesn’t jab you in the eye as ...”

“... to whomever was around or just people-watch. In this millennium, in cafés frequented by young white people, every customer seems to be silently staring at an Apple product, so that the places look and feel like offices. Even this phase may be on the way out. The next phase – of trying to keep customers from sticking around – has arrived. A food ...”

“... to do is to look at the editorial pages of the New York Times, the leading US newspaper, to read William Safire, who openly supports the settlers, and A.M. Rosenthal, who excoriates Arab ‘degeneracy’ on a regular basis. For such people and the constituency they represent, the Oslo accord was an excellent deal precisely because it solidified Israeli power ...”

“... hopefully christened the British Commonwealth of Nations. The British never put much money or white manpower into running the Empire, a habit rooted in parsimony but consorting well with the appearance of having greatness thrust upon them. Their agents were spread thinly and enjoyed great autonomy, ruling and sometimes extending their bit of empire with ...”