“... well enough, but in Fishponds Asylum. Grant, furious, went to visit his mother. She was 57 with white hair and missing teeth. She didn’t know who he was. He had felt deserted by his mother, but now had to realise that she believed he had deserted her. In London, he had some kind of breakdown. Thirteen years later, in Notorious, Grant does a magnificent ...”

“... were doctors trying to cure him.)This, coupled with Clinton’s ostentatious membership of an all-white golf-club, strikes me as a more pressing issue of morals and ‘character’ than l’affaire Flowers. But Clinton, who at first looks as if he welcomes a change of subject, doesn’t care for this one. He turns his back and marches away. Later on ...”

“... Martin Lieber. And the first issue of Superman was published, in 1938, by two young American Jews, Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster. As Michael Chabon wrote in The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (2000), whose protagonists are loosely based on Siegel and Shuster: ‘Superman, you don’t think he’s Jewish? … Clark Kent, only a Jew would pick a name like ...”

“... 9835. This created the Federal Employee Loyalty and Security Program, a decision, as Truman’s White House counsel Clark Clifford later admitted, driven by the prospect of the 1948 election and not by any security menace: ‘We did not believe there was a real problem. A problem was being manufactured.’ Truman himself, in private correspondence, said ...”

“... a lawsuit recently filed against Purdue. ‘The prescription blizzard will be so deep, dense, and white …’ The active ingredient of OxyContin is oxycodone, a semi-synthetic opiate (an ‘opioid’) first synthesised in Germany in 1916. Prior to OxyContin’s launch, oxycodone had been marketed as a painkiller in various pill forms for years, including ...”

“... pawed hop frog snack play. Come ploughed, she             jumps, ground. Bark tractor, white bitterhead grub and pull scarecrow.                   Me! assents his urine. Based on a tribal oral form, ‘The Buladelah-Taree Holiday Song Cycle’ (1977) is a perfect vehicle for Murray’s zoological, loco-descriptive and narrative ...”

“... of Music, and eventually started playing in a bar, becoming fascinated by Little Richard and Jerry Lee Lewis. He got a Saturday job to fund his record-buying habit. As he became more involved with what was happening in music, he was aware that the older generation was not amused. ‘People fucking hated it. And no one hated it more than my father … he ...”

“... of days, during which time we learn the man’s routine: he shaves, goes to the store, watches Jerry Springer on TV, drinks beer, occasionally gets drunk. All the time he conducts imaginary conversations with his wife, reminiscing, philosophising, grieving, and, all the time, he complains about the lack of light, that his wife’s flowers can’t flourish ...”

“... anecdotes exist side by side. From Ibn Ishaq we learn that when Muhammad was a boy, two men in white robes held him down, cut open his chest, removed a black spot from his heart and washed it with snow from a golden bowl before sewing him back up; elsewhere in the text, however, they are not men but cranes, who emptied beakfuls of ice water into his ...”

“... Without a written constitution this is impossible. The whole constitutional construction is jerry-built, riven by contradictions at every level and thus unstable. If New Labour really was ‘a party of principle’ it would have started by recognising that you can’t have constitutional reform without first having a written constitution. Drafting such ...”

“... in midtown Manhattan. In 1939 it received its own building, an International Style box clad in white marble designed by Philip Goodwin and Edward Durell Stone, on 53rd Street. A significant extension has followed every twenty years or so, each coolly modernist in style – totally abstract, highly engineered, fiercely refined, elegantly branded. The first ...”

“... and owner of a farm in nearby Franschhoek, who also attended the conference, the question for the white beneficiaries of apartheid is ‘how we had sort of got away with it’ (not the outcome he personally had sought: over the past 17 years he has tried to establish a new racially inclusive model of land distribution). In fact, the story told in My Father ...”

“... swagger of gangsta rap/hip-hop artists finds a large audience among 14-year-old suburban white boys who feel cut off from freedom and authenticity, Tom Sawyer again yearning to be Huck Finn, the first white Negro. Brancusi, that natural-born free agent, remained as open-minded as his King of Kings is literally ...”

“... tanned Jean-Paul Belmondo, glimpsed in a Paris café, ‘looks like a crème brûlée with white hair’), and he has a good ear for speech patterns, so that we do consistently seem to hear Kubrick speaking (‘Freddie? Can you talk?’ ‘You’re stopping work for Christmas?’ ‘Think that was about the Holocaust?’ – Kubrick is asking about ...”

“... Yet he knows he could have been a player, and he still likes to tell of the advice that he gave to Jerry Brown as late as the 1992 Democratic primaries. It could of course be a luxury to be in this position. How wonderful to have been able to compose this paragraph, for example, about that hideous Palace of Culture that still squats – appropriately next to ...”