“... itself as the alternative to years of ‘Tory sleaze’. We have been here before. In 1998 Tony Blair pledged that his government would be ‘purer than pure’, after the former Labour adviser Derek Draper was caught boasting to the undercover journalist Greg Palast about selling his Downing Street connections to business clients. But little has ...”

“... trousers and shirts with the two top buttons undone, collar points two feet apart, of tanned white skin, gold, nice teeth, the smell of tobacco and aftershave and deodorant, of men outwardly confident, hungry, vain, bullying, concupiscent and covetous, but also charming, garrulous, fascinating, prone to infatuations with strangers and their ...”

“... Poetry written in dialect seems to be undergoing a resurgence. Tony Harrison has made extensive use of Northern idioms. Tom Paulin has been busy raiding Ulster (and, I suspect, Scottish) dictionaries. Craig Raine has produced a manifesto, ‘Babylonish Dialects’, on dialect’s behalf. And several of the books under review here – by Scots, Welshmen and British West Indians – cannot be read without the glossaries which they thoughtfully provide ...”

“... Bill Clinton’s one-time aide and press secretary, published a memoir of his time in the White House entitled All Too Human: A Political Education. Back then, it seemed like a terribly exciting book: 1999 was the year of Clinton’s Senate trial, following his impeachment, and also of the first appearance on US television of The West Wing, which ...”

“... make it by just working hard.’ Eddie, it has to be said, looks like a friendlier version of Tony Soprano – but his main source of income is a valet parking business serving Hasidic weddings. He arrived in the US from Siberia in 1990, a 22-year-old straight out of university, part of the post-Soviet influx. He spoke fast, driving through Brooklyn with ...”

“... there is neither assertive nor apologetic. A preoccupied sense of crisis is not obligatory. Tony Harrison’s Selected Poems includes 14 poems from the Loiners (1970), eight from The School of Eloquence (1978), 36 from Continuous (1981), all of Palladas (1975), and about twenty uncollected poems. (Palladas, is Harrison’s version of about half the ...”

“... glass on a tour of local schools. That year the council’s then leader described Morris as ‘a white imperialist’ of no relevance to Walthamstow. The spectacular row which ensued generated online petitions, national press coverage and representations from the William Morris Society in the United States. Morris’s birthday, 24 March, saw demonstrations ...”

“... wrecking job on governance by deceit. It got rid of Nixon. His fixers, Gordon Liddy and the White House Plumbers, set to work on Ellsberg, when the papers came out, by ransacking the office of his psychiatrist; this was, of course, the crack special operations unit that later pulled off the Watergate break-in. They displayed, if you will, an excess of ...”

“... ethnic traditions: a tenement that housed Hispanic families is overhauled and made into condos for white yuppies; colourful dives, the Italian cobbler’s shop and the Greek breakfast joint are torn down to make room for a new mall. Gregorio, a former PhD student, works double shifts as a dishwasher at weekends and spends his free time aimlessly ...”

“... in the variety of our national experience, but geography as expressed in the large regions used by Tony Osman is far too crude an indicator. British Social Attitudes breaks down responses by age, by sex, by the great white or blue-collar divide, by political or religious affiliation, but not by social class, colour or ...”

“... as if Spielberg had forgotten he was making a movie or had handed over the reins to his writer, Tony Kushner. In these moments characters play out formal, rather static scenes, little historical tableaux with words. Just before a battle Lincoln chats with two black soldiers, who quote the Gettysburg Address to him; Lincoln tells his wife’s black maid that ...”

“... the most publicised recent killing was that of Chris Hani, the SACP (Communist) leader, by the white Right. The Azanian People’s Liberation Army, the armed wing of the Pan Africanist Congress, carries out anti-white atrocities from time to time and, of course, Inkatha takes its vengeance on the ANC with fair ...”

“... faces south of the river for regular bits of business, cash drops. These heavy suits would sit, white-knuckled, fingers digging into the scarlet leather, until they made it safely home to Poplar. They piled into the nearest boozer and pitched back the doubles until they could lift a shot glass without spilling half of its contents. The ride to the tunnel ...”

“... have flickering memories of television programmes glimpsed or devoured on our parents’ black and white TVs. Two in particular have stayed with me for more than five decades. First of all there was The Singing Ringing Tree, which I must have seen on one of its first BBC broadcasts in the mid-1960s. Subsequent DVD releases have revealed that, in its original ...”

“... changed in pendulum swings. In the post-Vietnam/post-Nixon mood which brought Jimmy Carter to the White House, it swung quite a long way against interventionism, and even conservative Republicans like California’s Governor, Ronald Reagan, fulminated against the idea of America being expected to act as policeman for the world. Sickened by exposures of ...”