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“... 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 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 ...”

“... that future contestants for the Lonsdale Belt ‘must be legally British subjects born of white parents’. This colour bar was eagerly promoted by Lord Lonsdale himself, with the connivance of the home secretary, Winston Churchill. Boxing was, nevertheless, to become a route to fame and fortune for many young black Britons, as it was for many Jewish ...”

“... the way of its being punished as a crime. At the very outset of his government, he pulled into the White House an ambiguous figure from the Bush-Cheney years, John Brennan. As a high official of the CIA under George Tenet, Brennan had registered a dissenting view of the interrogation techniques in 2001 and 2002, but took care to do so in a way that would ...”

“... possibility of a ‘life-size cold-cast bronze or copper statue of Elvis’ at £25,000. Pure white hand-polished busts of Elvis come in beautiful ‘marbelene’. Item G21 in the list is the Memorial Elvis Pillow, a tasselled affair inscribed in Victorian homily-Gothic lettering, God knew Elvis Was tired, so he Took him to Rest. The ‘Fantastic Elvis ...”

“... But then art history is a discipline still shaped by what Nochlin described in 1971 as ‘the white-male-position-accepted-as-natural’. This goes for the art we see too: in 2019 the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington DC reported that 87 per cent of the artists represented in US museums were men.‘Why Have There Been No Great Women ...”

“... and sometimes desperate circumstances, he told anyone who would listen that he was headed for the White House. He mapped out a plan to get there from which, as Robert Caro writes, ‘he refused to be diverted.’ It meant first establishing himself in state politics, then winning a seat in the House of Representatives, then moving up to the Senate and finally ...”

“... rebellion. Cambridge had a second objective too. Mr Brown, Flanigan writes, ‘like too many other white men in this island, carried on an amour with a woman belonging to the property, named Christiana, and it was the first intention of Cambridge to murder her as well as the overseer, supposing it was through her communications that so many discoveries of ...”

“... whoop down the avenue. The people who stopped put both hands on the Ferragamo window and the white light made each one a little blonder. One woman said ‘beautiful’; the glass misted up in front of her mouth. I walked on a few blocks. There was a midnight service going on at St Patrick’s Cathedral. A long queue stretched all the way down to the ...”