“... much the embodiment of her own favourite word, ‘zest’. In 1923 she married a Lloyd’s broker, Tony Maxtone Graham; she wrote poems, hymns and short stories, and did well. They had three children and lived in style in Chelsea. After a decade, however, the marriage went cold. His life began to revolve around cars and golf; she retaliated with botany and ...”

“... red wine. But photography was always the aim. In 1969 he photographed the images on his black and white television as Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walked on the moon. Motion in space is always slow motion, so a photographer looking on had more time to think about the action, such as it was. ‘Always been interested in astronomy and planets,’ says ...”

“... but avoiding the kind of unpopularity that might threaten his status as a proud member of White’s Club. When my father died, the Second World War was ending and Jack, nearly fifty, was broke. On the day after the funeral, my mother returned to the subject of the falcon. By now she had succeeded in infecting me with her sense of urgency in the ...”

“... to try to utter.’ No woman would assent to that last sentence unless she wanted to end up a white goddess, or an ordinary white elephant. (The Kings of Siam used to give a white elephant to hated courtiers, who would then promptly ruin themselves on its costly maintenance.) Yet John ...”

“... She stirs up ghosts and has no hand in laying them to rest. The centre wall of samplers deploys white figures cut from black paper: the subjects are all absences. This frieze, The Sovereign Citizens’ Sesquicentennial Civil War Celebration, brings the story from the plantation into the present, even though the cast of characters look unchangingly ...”

“... daughter cannot enter paradise until the tally of clothes is complete. The teller of this story, Tony McIlhenny, says the father has created ‘the worst punishment of all’ for his child, ‘not being able to let it die properly, getting it caught between this world and the next’. ‘The air of Donegal, of all Ireland, was full of such people, he had ...”

“... ever more intimate political relationships at the centre of power, even compared to the days when Tony Blair was ruling the country with the aid of his former pupil master and his former flatmate (and perhaps his wife as well). Of course, politics has always been about personal connections and private vendettas, but the current narrowing of the political ...”

“... immigrants won’t ‘integrate’. This shameful state of affairs was legitimised in 2005 by Tony Blair in the White Paper Controlling Our Borders: Making Migration Work for Britain: ‘Tolerance [is] under threat from those … abusing our hospitality.’ Faced with a moral panic about alien hordes pouring into ...”

“... latest polls show the Coloured vote breaking at least 3:1 in favour of the DA, a party led by a white, Helen Zille. (The DA is Helen Suzman’s old party.) This is remarkable. In Cape Town both mayoral candidates, the DA’s Patricia de Lille and the ANC’s Tony Ehrenreich, are Coloured. Ehrenreich, a Marxist and trade ...”

“... covering of flesh was so transmuted with ecstasy that early passion became a heavenly embrace of white fiery flame. There are joys so complete, so all perfect, that one should not survive them. Ah why did not my burning soul find exit that night, and fly, like Blake’s angel, through the clouds of our earth to another sphere? These alarming words helped to ...”

“... off by the Ukip MEP Godfrey Bloom for not cleaning behind the fridge), and not all of us were white: demographically unpromising candidates for membership in a party which is anyway tiny – an order of magnitude smaller than Labour or the Tories, its membership amounts to 0.06 per cent of the electorate. The amateur Ukip enthusiast may have meant only ...”

“... waving their neofascist banners, the letters FN emblazoned in black italic script on a red and white background. For about half a second I felt like Isherwood in Berlin in the early 1930s. Then I reminded myself that the most right-wing of the 16 parties competing for my neighbours’ votes at the beginning of next week has no chance of coming to power. In ...”

“... than anything painters commonly manage comes through. Sir John Herschel’s stubbly chin and wild white hair as they emerge from draped velvet in Julia Margaret Cameron’s photograph do not conform to the painterly canon of images of great men. But many early art photographs do recall paintings. Country people in Peter Henry Emerson’s pictures from the ...”

“... pages of the Financial Times, the New York Times and the Economist. They depict the tyro in the White House as an unprecedented calamity, more so evidently than the economic inequality, deadlocked government, subprime debt, offshored jobs, unrestrained corporate power and compromised legislature that made Trump seem a credible candidate to millions of ...”

“... If​ his English teacher hadn’t been so snootily discouraging, it’s unlikely that Tony Harrison would have gone on to write as much as he has: by my calculation, 13 plays, 11 films and twenty or more poetry collections and pamphlets, not to mention the essays and addresses assembled in Edith Hall’s edition of his selected prose ...”