“... sprawl scattered like so much confetti over the gnarly green terrain. In the distance, the tall white cluster of buildings that formed downtown Los Angeles poked through a corona of smog. Coming into view below was my destination: the 480-acre subdivision established in 1887 and named ‘Hollywood’ by a real estate speculator’s wife because, she ...”

“... and safer, especially for America and Israel’. He is given a shrunken skull and ‘exceptionally white teeth’; Franzen goes to some lengths to deny him a name: it is clear we are approaching the heart of darkness. It’s worth quoting his exchange with Joey across a packed dinner table: ‘We have to learn to be comfortable with stretching some ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... is far less vandalism than you might expect, partly because of the long, straight, open lines.’Jerry Flynn runs the 35 Per Cent Campaign. He was a teenager on the Heygate Estate in the 1970s, when it was new. Not long ago he sent me a video by the Conservative housing spokesman, James Cleverly. Cleverly, in beige trousers and a blue blazer, a handkerchief ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”