“... of star turns, hair-sprayed media appearances, and retouched magazine covers. It’s a pink-and-white girls’ world, the dominion of the beauty queen. We are trapped in Miss America’s boudoir. She’s our rival, not to be won over by a show of masculine strength, care, or protection, but only to be bested in a competition where the odds are not on our ...”

“... of pain worse even than losing a child. ‘She’s my best girlfriend,’ Elvis sobbed on the white steps of Graceland when she was gone: ‘She’s all we lived for.’ Before she met Elvis’s father, she was Gladys Love Smith. Her mother was Octavia Luvenia Mansell, her great-grandmother was a Cherokee, Morning ...”

“... he is stuck for ever in the era of the liberation struggle. During the many years of Ian Smith’s white minority regime, it seemed there was little that Mugabe’s party, Zanu, could do in the face of white power. Zanu’s armed wing, Zanla, was no match for the better trained and better equipped Rhodesians, and Mugabe ...”

“... diasporic circles. The Jamaican poet Mutabaruka responded with his own performance poem, ‘White Man Country’, whose central refrain Johnson quoted in a piece in the Guardian in 2005: ‘it no good fi stay inna white man country too long.’ The piece is collected in Time Come, a selection of Johnson’s prose from ...”

“... only in their own minds) include Katherine Burns, a siren who can’t help using men; Sam Black, a tortured soul for whom writing is a salving agony; and Sonny, the 653rd Maharajah of Badanpur, who assumes that The Mulberry Elephant, a vast self-justificatory volume privately published in India, will somehow sweep the field. If the lining isn’t ...”

“... exile community of professional victims, and finally the ANC’. When he left ‘there were still white pipedreams of decency in the land,’ but there’s no going back to them: ‘I am now of the wrong sex and wrongish colour ... using a wrong language and holding the wrong opinions. Worse – I’ve run out of convictions!’ ‘There is,’ he ...”

“... Inside, under a glass cover, was the embalmed corpse of Ho Chi Minh, two years dead, dressed in a white suit. US troops never found the heavily guarded site, although once, by chance, they landed nearby. A North Vietnamese general told the team from Moscow that if the Americans ever captured the body, Hanoi would be prepared to give all up its US POWs to get ...”

“... to take in a few people around the band: Wilson, Hannett and the band’s manager, Rob Gretton. Sam Riley gives a perfect impersonation of Curtis, capturing his mannerisms, the onstage flailings and the voice. The original intention was for the actors to mime to the songs, but in the end they performed them themselves. This makes the live scenes feel ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... devices left around – the stage-directions, the Hollywood sets and props, or the drollery of white-furred crocodiles and cyanide shoes. But some of these devices are a bit nervous. ‘The Unconscious Imitated by a Cheesecake’ – chapter heading – was perhaps arrived at by chance, through aleatory techniques (not generally much in evidence in this ...”

“... study of the ‘systems of the body’. The book is remarkable for its lack of other people. Sam, Ehrlich’s dog who was struck by her side, is given a character we come to know as rounded and vibrant. He works hard, is loyal, affectionate and alert; and is duly rewarded with hamburgers and fries at fast-food chains when there is one nearby. Blaine, the ...”

“... tell him that people receiving American food parcels were not chanting, ‘Thank you, Uncle Sam, for the rice,’ but: ‘By our blood, by our souls, we will sacrifice our lives for you, O Saddam!’ Somebody fucked up, and blame is thrown from hand to hand like a live grenade. Sooner or later, if nobody falls on it, it will blow them all away. The ...”

“... birth son having his revenge on the usurping adoptive brother, we know from the presence of a white cat that Oberhauser will reveal himself to be Ernst Stavro Blofeld, the sinister mastermind familiar from three of Ian Fleming’s later novels and from his showdowns with the Bonds played by Sean Connery, George Lazenby and Roger Moore. (Copyright issues ...”

“... in many novels and films, from Hans Fallada’s Alone in Berlin to Michael Verhoeven’s The White Rose. Stauffenberg and the other conspirators of July 1944 understood that their plan to murder Hitler and stage a coup was unlikely to come off. Instead of success, there would be the recorded fact that they had tried. They played for moral ...”

“... and Virginia Woolf; and with Chiang Kai-shek, Hitler, Mussolini and Roosevelt, not to mention Sam Goldwyn and Charlie Chaplin. These are the men and women who made the modern world, and the Modernist expression of it: their identity as a generation is more important than 1914, a year in which some of them began to fight a war, but more of them ...”