“... Khomeini (Imam, pan-Islamic revolutionary, reviver of Muslim purity, etc) was, according to the White House, the head of a ‘terrorist state’. Now Mr Rushdie (freedom of speech etc) has for many thousands of Muslims become a blasphemer against God, worthy only of death. It matters not, in this argument, whether the accusations are true or false ...”

“... BBC in November and December, complicates and enriches this schema. In the third episode, ‘Red, White and Blue’, Leroy Logan applies to join the Met: he wants to combat police racism from the inside. His father is outraged. ‘What did you expect?’ Leroy tells him. ‘You made us feel we could be part of everything. You wanted us to be more British than ...”

“... as the starting point for a discussion of a wider theme, such as publishing or prostitution. Jerry White’s epigraphs, like his subtitle, come from Blake’s Jerusalem (1804-20), but the contemporary voices in the text tend to be less unworldly. Some of them – Hazlitt, Louis Simond, Dickens, Charles Booth, Arthur Munby, ‘Walter’, Molly Hughes – are ...”

“... a different artistic field: a Tin Pan Alley song, a Saturday Evening Post cover (presumably by Norman Rockwell) and a poem by Eddie Guest (a forgotten poetaster). More than thirty years later, in 1971, speaking to a seminar at Bennington College, Greenberg came up with much the same list, its scope now broadened to include ‘bad movies, dime novels, bad ...”

“... in 1960, when Leslie Fiedler published Love and Death in the American Novel, four years after Norman Rush graduated from Swarthmore College, where he met the woman whose ‘heart, sensibility and intellect are so signally – if perforce esoterically – celebrated and exploited’ in the novels he would come to write, to cite the dedication to the first ...”

“... The new select committee system was launched in 1979 with a characteristic flourish by Norman St John Stevas, then Leader of the House of Commons. MPs were ‘embarking upon a series of changes that could constitute the most important Parliamentary reforms of the century’. The proposals were ‘intended to redress the balance of power’ – as between Parliament and the executive – ‘to enable the House of Commons to do more efficiently the job it has been elected to do ...”

“... and unexpectedly: no words could express the beauty of it. The dreary, dismal mud was baked white and pure – dazzling white. While daisies, red poppies and a blue flower, great masses of them, stretched for miles and miles. The sky a pure, dark blue, and the whole air, up to a height of about forty feet, thick with ...”

“... His apprenticeship was unusually diverse. Louis was born, in 1954, into a military family (the Norman conquering gene still working away, apparently) and won an Army scholarship at 14. This paid his public school fees, on condition that he went on to Sandhurst. After four months there, he decided that the soldier’s life was not for him. The moment of ...”

“... are antique shops in Stockbridge, where antique seems to mean the day before yesterday. And grand white wooden houses, behind evergreen trees, houses which turn out to be lunatic asylums. Stockbridge, peaceful home of Norman Rockwell, the people’s artist, who gave Middle America what it wanted. Stockbridge, where Melville ...”

“... strength of the right in Canada and Australia. This is the notion of the Anglosphere. It’s a white English-speaking male preoccupation, founded in a selective view of history that portrays war as inevitable, noble and glorious, where Britain and the majority white countries of its former empire repeatedly come together ...”

“... of going to a Shakin’ Stevens concert in Birmingham. The second part is mostly reviews: of Norman Mailer’s The Prisoner of Sex, The Complete Uncollected Short Stories of J.D. Salinger, a book about the ‘Catholic sensibility’ of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Blake Morrison’s The Movement, Martin Amis’s Success, Tony Tanner’s Adultery in the ...”

“... whoop down the avenue. The people who stopped put both hands on the Ferragamo window and the white light made each one a little blonder. One woman said ‘beautiful’; the glass misted up in front of her mouth. I walked on a few blocks. There was a midnight service going on at St Patrick’s Cathedral. A long queue stretched all the way down to the ...”

“... In City Without Walls, W.H. Auden included this squib: Even Hate should be precise: very few White Folks have fucked their mothers. A valid point, except that, in a sense, Auden’s plea for precision is vitiated by his easily explained misapprehension that ‘mother-fucker’ is an epithet exclusively applied to whites by blacks. Auden’s experience ...”

“... Not​ many people have heard of Norman Borlaug, but his invention – the high-yield, short-straw wheat that fuelled the Green Revolution – is consumed every day by the majority of humans on the planet. Without Borlaug’s wheat, there would be no modern food as we know it. Everything from sandwiches to pizza to soy sauce to animal feed is manufactured from wheats adapted from Borlaug’s ...”

“... in the land of Catita, where Jackanapes flies with his tail in his mouth, to seek out a lady as white as snow and as red as blood?’ Jack is dead. The character who speaks to Eumenides here, and asks to be taken into his service, is the grateful ghost of a poor man for whose burial Eumenides, although a stranger and mere passer-by, had earlier and ...”