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“... house in the International Settlement, with a bathroom for every bedroom and ten servants. James and Edna’s social life seems to have consisted of the grim expat cliché of endless rounds of bridge and too much gin. Their lives hardly intersected with those of Shanghai’s millions of Chinese inhabitants. Ballard’s attempts to befriend the son of ...”

“... marginalise the contradiction between liberty and slavery in the Revolutionary era. Take the Mel Gibson movie The Patriot, which shows a South Carolina planter with a black ‘employee’ who willingly joins a Patriot militia and takes arms against the British. Have a look at the many high-school or college textbooks in the US in which slavery is depicted as ...”

“... five weeks after the ship went down. It starred a real-life survivor – the 22-year-old Dorothy Gibson, already famous as a model when she became Brulatour’s mistress (both were married). Rushing across the ocean to be in Brulatour’s arms, she had found a place in a half-empty lifeboat that failed to go back and rescue would-be survivors flailing in the ...”

“... leave school believing that all Scottish emigration was caused by the Highland Clearances. Mel Gibson in Braveheart wears a kilt to play William Wallace. George IV squeezed himself into a kilt and pink tights to visit Edinburgh. Livingstone was supposed to get on well with Africans because of his Highland ancestry. It wasn’t until the 1960s that radicals ...”

“... 1936, a few days after the German invasion of the Rhineland, Nancy Astor threw a party at 4 St James’s Square. As well as being the first woman MP (elected in 1919), Astor was a legendary hostess. To this particular dinner party she invited various League of Nations delegates, the American and Russian ambassadors, an assortment of English friends and ...”

“... Brilliant and mercurial, he had charmed Hoover, who dined several times at his house, and mentored James Angleton, the future CIA head of counterintelligence. As Allen Dulles later said, Philby had the keys to the CIA safe. An internal investigation was inconclusive. He was asked to tender his resignation and, according to his highly unreliable ...”

“... outside it: J.G. Ballard as an author of realist novels, Samuel Delany in academia, William Gibson, Lethem himself (whose first books owed a lot to Dick). The sciences – biomedical sciences, climatology, ecology, information technology – seem omnipresent now. It should surprise no one that at least one writer who spent most of his life in SF has ...”

“... authority, few rivals outside the work of DeLillo, Pynchon and (more to his own taste) William Gibson. And, as in their novels, local observation in Jameson was complemented by an implacable awareness of what he called the ‘unrepresentable exterior’ enclosing all the slick and streaming phenomena in view. In the novelists, however, allusion to the ...”

“... novel’s reputation declined, thanks in large part to another black American in Paris. In 1949 James Baldwin described Native Son as a modern-day Uncle Tom’s Cabin, ‘a continuation, a complement of that monstrous legend it was written to destroy’, arguing that Bigger Thomas ‘admits the possibility of his being subhuman’ and that Wright was no ...”

“... the shop, Mr John, back to the “plasters, pills and ointment boxes”.’ Thus ‘Z’, or John Gibson Lockhart, writing for the new, socially aspirant, notoriety-seeking Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine in 1818, leading a series of attacks, by no means all of them from Blackwood’s, on the circle that welcomed Keats after he turned from surgery (the ...”

“... jut-jawed selflessness. (‘I now perceive one immense omission in my Psychology,’ William James once wrote; ‘the deepest principle of Human Nature is the craving to be appreciated.’) Somewhere, it seems, there must be a lost baby picture of me – at my father’s perhaps? – in which I look just like Mel ...”

“... in Walmer Road while Tilbury and PC Dave Pullan went to another temporary relief centre, Clement James in Treadgold Street. ‘Because we were in uniform,’ Rumble said, ‘we were seen as authority figures, but people wouldn’t have perceived us as having anything to do with the council. But we are council. I was inside the cordon and my team were there ...”