“... continually forsook legal niceties to please the political gallery. Aware that most of the ANC’s white supporters were Jews, as were a number of their legal defence team, including Joffe, he was determined to show the regime that he was a ‘good Jew’, resolved as they were to crack down on the blacks and the bad Jews. As soon as he met Joffe he began ...”

“... be vindicated in their appeals, even though they had one trump card up their sleeves: they were white. The petitioners’ circumstances were unusual: they had been transported to Barbados as suspected Royalist insurgents after the failed Salisbury Uprising of 1655. But, in the mid-17th century, white people could be found ...”

“... to Lord Byron’, but also a number of other putative letters (to Richard Crossman and William Coldstream, for instance), MacNeice’s ‘Eclogue from Iceland’, the famously camp prose-piece ‘Hetty to Nancy’, and the joint-authored ‘Last Will and Testament’. According to Auden, MacNeice wrote about eighty of the 240 pages (the review in ...”

“... 1841, the whaling ship Acushnet, newly built at Fairhaven, Massachusetts, fell in with the whaler William Wirt, of Nantucket, near the Pacific island of Juan Fernández (Alexander Selkirk’s lonely home during the years 1704-9), off the coast of Chile. One of the Acushnet’s fo’c’sle crew was the young Herman Melville. The two ships hove to for a few ...”

“... Edward the Confessor built the first abbey, next to his palace at Westminster, in 1042, and William the Conqueror became the first king to be crowned in it, on Christmas Day 1066. Henry II, fancying a saint in the family, bought Edward’s canonisation from the schismatic Pope Alexander III in 1161 in return for some very welcome support. Henry III ...”

“... their freedom. Perhaps what he saw in Richmond changed his mind: the eerie absence of the city’s white inhabitants confirmed what Sumner saw as ‘the utter impossibility of any organisation which is not founded on the votes of negroes’. When Lincoln spoke from the White House balcony a week later, he was ...”

“... stepped onto the world stage as an imperial power in the Spanish-American War of 1898, President William McKinley insisted that ours was a ‘benevolent’ imperialism, that the conquest of Puerto Rico and the Philippines ought not to be compared to the despotic actions of European powers. Woodrow Wilson insisted that only the US possessed the combination of ...”

“... fringe, even if it is less full-bodied than Hezza’s? Johnson’s new job ought perhaps to worry William Hague, who peaked in the hair stakes when he was 16. But why should blondness be important to a serious periodical like the Spectator? In a recent number of the rag (6 January) there’s an article by Big Boris defending ...”

“... text and requiring more than three million ‘carefully ordered pieces of movable type’ (Eric White gives us all these numbers in his new study, such is his commitment to exactness). Magnificent handwritten Bibles were already in circulation. Just a few years before Gutenberg’s, the Giant Bible of Mainz was made for the abbey of Johannisberg, the work ...”

“... necessary’ and an attempt to prove that all ‘black’ people were naturally inferior to the ‘white race’.*It is ironic, therefore, that Long is our main source about Francis Williams, who in his lifetime (he died in 1762) had been the most famous Black person in the world, at least among educated English-speaking people. He was rich; he was a ...”

“... memoir, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, was puffed by Moody), David Foster Wallace and William T. Vollmann, Moody spurns the eye-dropper technique of minimalism that was fashionable when he was a nervous colt in the 1980s in favour of a bachelor-guy pack-rat approach where everything the author has ever seen, read, felt or heard on headphones is ...”

“... on hire From some strange warehouse, and from some pained sense of duty. There were busts of William Shakespeare, who is deep. On several occasions before he moved in, the doctor dropped     in to do a little handiwork himself. He’d arrive on a bright, metallic-coloured motor-bike. It looked like the thorax and abdomen of an insect that had ...”

“... Its author was a British settler writing from Nyeri, in the colony’s newly established ‘white highlands’. The year was 1908.            Dear Sir James Sadler,      A grave matter has occurred here.      Complaints were made to me by natives whose confidence I have that their women were being brought to the Government boma ...”

“... woman called Alice Howe Gibbens at the Radical Club in Boston and immediately concluded that William James should marry her. In one version of the story, Henry James Sr returned from a meeting and announced to those at home that he had seen William’s future bride. Another version attributes the discovery to the ...”

“... courtyard. The entrance lobby’s cool, airy silence was a contrast to the intense heat and white light of the afternoon outside. I took the lift up and was let into the office, where I was shown into an empty room with a desk. I spoke with the first of the people who had been asked to come for interview. As with every compliance audit, on my list of ...”