“... 1890s to 1940. It was written over the course of four years but reads as if it had been done in white heat over six weeks; each written page represents the compression of a thousand pages read. The moral pressure is extraordinary: with just a few happy exceptions, the story of each writer is told as a miniature tragedy, a squandered opportunity, a ...”

“... ads that portrayed the tax as an attack on ‘the entire black community’: Unlike most white Americans, many African Americans who accumulated wealth did so facing race discrimination in education, employment, access to capital, and equal access to government resources. In many cases, race discrimination was supported by governmental policies and ...”

“... good place not to go out from. A self-curated mausoleum of memories: photographs, toys, magazines, William Morris wallpaper, Arts and Crafts furniture; a library of Victorian and Edwardian fiction, Stevenson, Meredith, Wells, Conrad, W. Pett Ridge. Moorcock, with his sacred cats in a basket, brings up a map of London on his screen, shifting and rearranging ...”

“... so he went in. A splendidly built young man, stripped to the waist, and with a torso of dazzling white, was standing not far from me. He was tall, handsome and serene, and was repelling with his boxing gloves a hectic assault of Ezra’s. After a final swing at the dazzling solar plexus Pound fell back upon his settee. The young man was Hemingway. Pound got ...”

“... Casa Guidi. At Rome in the winter of 1860-61 he spent most of his time in the studio of his friend William Wetmore Story, modelling clay figures, too absorbed (or depressed) even to read. In the same period he is known to have offered the ‘Roman murder story’ to a number of his friends (including Anthony Trollope and Tennyson) and the idea that he himself ...”

“... anything back, even when he is playing around with the truth, is the man whose later career in the White House overlapped with the early years of Blair’s and Howard’s premierships. Bill Clinton was the sincerest liar in modern political history, and what he, and his opponents, and the American public discovered was that the sincerity could easily trump the ...”

“... of his work; Outcast London began with a survey of British economic thought from David Ricardo to William Stanley Jevons. Now, Stedman Jones’s commitment to the constitutive power of language propelled him down a path that eventually led to a tamed version of social democracy. In An End to Poverty (2004), he sought to recover a lost critical tradition that ...”

“... in his essay ‘Shooting an Elephant’, written 17 years later, that his ‘whole life, every white man’s life in the East, was one long struggle not to be laughed at’. The horror of what happened that day sank in immediately. Gerard Wathen, the principal of Khalsa College, who had intervened to stem the street violence of two days earlier, told Dyer ...”

“... beach in Venezuela. There was Don Porfirio, and the Perons, and Batista, who always dressed in white and kept taking baths to get rid of his tar. And there was – oh my God, it’s too long a list to suggest coincidence. When the latest avatar dies in Cuba (and he looks more and more like his own waxwork), English writers and journalists won’t have to ...”

“... for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in Atlanta learned of a case of Aids in a 62-year-old, white, married haemophiliac. Aids had only just been recognised as some sort of, as yet mysterious, immune deficiency syndrome and until this case it seemed to have infected exclusively sexually promiscuous gays and Haitians. Six months later, there were two more ...”

“... feeling of working against time ... We walked with the utmost care between the narrowly placed white tape lines that marked the mine-cleared path, and headed for a tent marked with a Red Cross ... The dust that rose in the grey night light seemed like the fog of war itself. Then it was perhaps the most surprising of all the day’s surprises to smell the ...”

“... in the lobby of the Paris Ritz minutes before her death; O.J. Simpson’s ‘live’ escape in the white Bronco. The Omagh bombing was enhanced as a terrifyingly real tragedy when home footage appeared. The drama of Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman’s disappearance was heightened when CCTV footage appeared of the girls crossing a sports club car park in Soham ...”

“... its role in strengthening the North’s position in negotiations with the US. The New York Times White House reporter David Sanger has published so many ‘scoops’ from US Intelligence that some of his colleagues just call him ‘Scoop’. Unfortunately, quite a few have been wrong. Sanger has been particularly good at omitting all the CIA’s ...”

“... hunter, like the army colonels and senior plantation managers whose stories he listened to in the white men’s club in Kotagiri, who told him that when killing big cats you needed to aim for a good breaking shot into the heart. I suspect that the day he and Belli killed the leopard was the best of his life. He was only 25, and the empire had given him ...”

“... only make men and women speak – give you truth broken into prismatic hues, and fear the pure white light, even if it is in me.’ He is finding fault with himself on grounds Shelley provided: ‘The One remains, the many change and pass;/Heaven’s light forever shines, Earth’s shadows fly;/Life, like a dome of many-coloured glass,/Stains the ...”