“... name for my own blueberry-loving toddler than the jubilant More Fruit. In 1603 the antiquary William Camden cited the new practice among the gentry of using surnames as first names, pointing to Grevill Varney, Bassingburne Gawdy and Calthorp Parker: ‘Although many dislike it, for the great inconvenience that will ensue … neverthelesse it seemeth to ...”

“... warehouse building. H. said, ‘I hear it’s going to be very classy. I hear it’s going to have white rats.’ H. spoke about his former wife and toothbrushes: ‘She was always at it, fiercely, many hours a day and night.’Harrison spent his childhood on a ranch in northern California shooting rattlesnakes, his adolescence selling marijuana and then ...”

“... McCarthy, whose first novel, The Orchard Keeper, was published in 1966, but we continue to ignore William Eastlake, who worked (Go in Beauty and Portrait of an Artist with 26 Horses) a parallel seam with equal distinction. To be read, a player, a part of the buzz, you need to be given away with copies of Esquire magazine. (McCarthy was an established ...”

“... Laura Curtis’s language strikes one as extravagant: she is importing a Romantic sublime or William Goldingesque apocalypticism into Defoe’s sober scene. Then what about the following? ‘In Chapter Two, I traced two tendencies in Robinson Crusoe and in A Journal of the Plague Year that conflict with Defoe’s compulsion to construct in his writing an ...”

“... than many sentimental retrospectives allow. But now it is the Republican Party which shelters the white supremacists and religious bigots. Gingrich didn’t really hate the Sixties. But for tactical reasons, he needs the people who did. Much of this book is taken up with a restatement of the Contract with America on which the GOP took both Houses in ...”

“... Wills calls this ‘Bomb Power’ and claims that it has excited fantasies of omnipotence in the White House and reduced Congress to a spectator. Among the public, it fosters a cult, elevating the president from commander in chief of the military to commander in chief of the nation, enjoining all American citizens to spring smartly to attention and ...”

“... opportunities for the ambitious and resourceful. At the start of the century, only one in ten white men worked for someone else. As late as 1860, when Lincoln was touting the promise of upward mobility for all, only 40 per cent worked for wages. Ironically, the Civil War – America’s great battle cry of freedom – wrecked the republican idyll. The ...”

“... of the human herd.’ If you cite this sort of passage from Nietzsche (or similar ones in William James or John Dewey) in order to argue that what we call ‘the search for objective truth’ is not a matter of getting your beliefs to correspond better and better to the way things really are, but of attaining intersubjective agreement, or of ...”

“... was sitting in a field by a narrow dirt road near the town of Grapevine, Texas, playing with a white rabbit that she had named Sonny Boy. She was waiting for her mother, to whom she intended to give the rabbit as an Easter present, but the rendezvous got delayed. By the time Sonny Boy finally met his new owner, probably on 18 April, he would have witnessed ...”

“... rose to a great height on a sort of trunk and then split off into branches … Sometimes it looked white, sometimes blotched and dirty.’ The Elder Pliny, deciding to go and take a closer look, ordered a boat to be made ready to cross the bay, and invited his nephew along. The Younger Pliny said he’d rather get on with his studies, not least because his ...”

“... else, a consummate salesman. He appears on Palantir’s earnings calls dressed in standard-issue white T-shirts and with a quasi-punk haircut. He rattles off quarterly earnings and throws out jargon like ‘ontology’ and ‘user-centred machine learning’ as if Palantir invented them. (Object-oriented ontology was already in vogue in the 1990s with the ...”

“... space, or time; here, it was the opposite. The Ellington and Hereson School is a set of shining white blocks built in 2007 as part of Labour’s PFI programme. As well as Farage, Charlie Leys, the sixth-former who had organised and was chairing the event, had managed to pull in South Thanet’s sitting Tory MP, Laura Sandys, a believer in EU membership who ...”

“... Washington rival) George Croghan into Ohio Country with a pack train of goods, including enough white linen shirts to clothe half the male Indian population, in an attempt to start realising its vision of imperial-Native co-prosperity, it was attacked in 1765 by a gang of American settlers (‘the Black Boys’) dressed up as Indians with charcoaled ...”

“... for this was Protestant-ruled Northern Ireland in the 1950s, a place not altogether unlike the white-ruled South Africa evoked in the frank confessional of David Schalkwyk’s opening chapter. In the apartheid world, the young Schalkwyk ‘was defined legally, socially and … psychologically as a “master”’, even as the material realities of bondage ...”

“... And of songs: ‘David of the White Rock’, the ‘Summer Song’ so soft, and that Beautiful tune to which roguish words by Welsh pit boys Are sung – but never more beautiful than here under the ...”