“... poison seeped in.’ The gentle delineation of the growing love between Lindsey and her boyfriend, Sam, proves a counterpoint to the lost life of Susie, who has the bittersweet experience of participating, from heaven, in her sister’s growing-up, including Lindsey’s loss of virginity: ‘At 14, my sister sailed away from me into a place I’d never ...”

“... Life of LBJ reminds one, is something else again. Whereas British political biography, with the (white) elephantine exception of Martin Gilbert’s Churchill is, almost as a matter of professional pride, a one-volume affair, there is a well established American tradition of monumentalism, based, it seems, on the assumption that a blockbusting person requires ...”

“... they applied so liberally to their hair. Caribbean doctors, judges and lawyers were invariably white and England came to be associated with rectitude, the pulling-up of socks and standing to attention. In the Cadet Corps, on school Speech Days, whenever the National Anthem was played, Englishness compelled deference and a feeling that one was in the ...”

“... the average Hollywood day. Here he is describing one of his boss’s difficulties: Mia had a big white cat named Malcolm that she adored. She was always talking sign language to the cat, who was deaf. Mia’s obsession with Malcolm was bad enough, but the sign language really got on Frank’s nerves. He didn’t mind cats in general, but he came to despise ...”

“... cinema – is himself a historical monument ‘condensing into a single figure the structures of white supremacist racial integration that built the United States: black labour in the realm of production, inter-racial nurture and sex (the latter as both a private practice and unifying public prohibition) in the realm of reproduction, and blackface minstrelsy ...”

“... The Crown (with ‘a swirly carpet’, owned by a fraudster called Cyril), The White Hart, The King’s Arms (‘lobster thermidor’). He lists the secret vices of this world – ‘winklepickers, illegitimacy, tinned salmon, canals, hair cream’ – and its characteristic foods: ‘towers of biscuits, Camp Coffee, Shippam’s ...”

“... of Confederate soldiers in the American South. In this wave of iconoclasm, Cecil Rhodes, Silent Sam, Robert E. Lee and Edward Colston were practically surrogates for each other in a transnational story of empire, colonialism and slavery – a story that demanded retelling with renewed attention to its victims. Like some businesses, churches and government ...”

“... of perfect equipoise.Porter (1891-1964) was the cosseted surviving child of three born to Kate and Sam Porter, a pharmacist in Peru, Indiana. He inherited his aptitude for music from his father, a good pianist with an attractive tenor voice. ‘I suppose he started me writing lyrics,’ Porter said – he wrote his first song when he was ten. He inherited his ...”

“... shy and misunderstood. The following year he received a presidential pardon due in part, the White House said, to lobbying by the powerful and unlikely duo of Henry Kissinger and Elton John. Nonetheless Amiel remains furious at the way she and Black have been treated and is intent on establishing his innocence on all counts. Her memoir is a bookend to ...”

“... feature of the ‘American exceptionalism’ celebrated in the introduction. He identifies white supremacy as another constitutive feature of the United States, one that became ever more pervasive after the Emancipation Proclamation, and one which, according to Evans, white Americans have had more difficulty coming ...”

“... by indentations in a mound of ice decorated with trailing seaweed; the experience was bathed in white and silver, in seaside light. It was an introduction to the mythology of France, of being British and having to learn what the French have to teach. I did not realise, until I read The English, the French and the Oyster, the extent to which the oyster had ...”

“... he said quietly. ‘She says I should stay at home, nice and cosy. That I should wear the white jumper. She makes oliebollen with the wrong pieces of apple … Almighty, everlasting, she thought she was buying wine, but it was fruit juice. The sweet, good woman. Berry-apple. She moves her head back and forth when she reads. She is my mother. See her ...”

“... that is uncalled-for, unearned even, and so it is annoying too: the crosshatched brushstrokes of white emulsion are accidental; the crab’s golden-orange back is just on its way to ruin; the expensive haircut looks its best after eight hours of your lying on it. The beauty doesn’t last – it isn’t meant to. It is something that happens along the ...”

“... owe everything to memories of my mother and her struggle.’ The American cover has a black and white photograph of a boy and a woman in bed, their foreheads touching in a maternal embrace. (On the British cover, a boy sits on a post that looks not unlike a cross.) Much of the story is excruciating, and it is in a long line of books with trauma as the main ...”

“... researching Jean Harlow didn’t know how to use her allure. Carr relates a date with the curator Sam Green:The moment [Green] remembered most came near the end of the evening, when Phebe’s had emptied and waiters were upending chairs onto tables. Candy reached over to Green and, in his words, ‘put those long thin fingers on top of my hand, rested them ...”