“... chance that you would have met her in some club or at some party, or even on the pavement outside. Martin Amis remembers her showing up at the end of a dinner, on the arm of Nicholas Soames, and seating herself at the piano to sing ‘My Old Man’s a Dustman’ (to which, of course, the only answer was ‘no he ain’t’). Two members of the New Left Review ...”

“... this humiliating past. Henning, the birthplace of Alex Haley; the Lorraine Motel, Memphis, where Martin Luther King was assassinated on 3 April 1968; Dayton, where John Scopes was convicted in 1925 for teaching evolution to his biology class. Tennessee still stumbles under the burden of being a Civil War battleground (the ...”

“... had drastically changed his tune. Most of the chapter ‘Race in Utopia’ could be quoted by Martin Luther King without embarrassment. There are no ‘inferior races’, Wells now asserts. Nor is there any physiological basis for racial discrimination. ‘Even the Jews’, he observes, have more physical differences ...”

“... and more affecting, chief among them the subject’s hands. One hand alone may clutch the brow (Martin Luther King, 1961), support the whole skull (Cecil Beaton, 1951), point its index finger into the upper lip (Colette, 1952) or into the lower lip (Tony Hancock, 1962), or feel the forelock (Francis Bacon, 1981); two ...”

“... his presidential address to criticism of Black studies. Coming a year after the assassination of Martin Luther King, the title of his lecture, ‘Clio with Soul’, seemed condescending to Black historians. He warned white scholars against aligning with this ‘fashionable cause’ and advised the ‘brother in ...”

“... making the world as a whole more just. ‘Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere,’ Martin Luther King said. Although he uses the quotation, Risse can’t possibly agree, for in his view ‘domestic justice and global justice have different standards’: what is unjust on one ground may be just on another, and ...”

“... on Sam and Dave, the studio’s breadwinners now that Redding was gone. Then, in April 1968, Martin Luther King was assassinated a few miles away at the Lorraine, a motel which had been a safe haven for Stax musicians. ‘That was the turning point,’ Steve Cropper’s musical partner, Booker T. Jones, told ...”

“... legally, on state capitols with loaded shotguns. The NRA has taken to honouring the birthday of Martin Luther King because, before he became America’s most famous proponent of non-violence, he had once been denied a gun permit in Alabama, and so, according to NRA logic, was actually a ‘victim of gun control’ when he ...”

“... Shaka King’s​ Judas and the Black Messiah (available on Amazon Prime) leaves us in no doubt as to who is the more interesting character. This preference is obscured (or perhaps highlighted) by the fact that the actors playing the two parts (LaKeith Stanfield and Daniel Kaluuya) have both been nominated as ‘best supporting actor’ at this year’s Oscars, as if there were no main role, or it might be dangerous to say which it is ...”

“... as anachronistic. In their brief, well-illustrated and lucid account of her career, Hollings, Martin and Rice all firmly distance themselves from any aspirations to ‘relevance’ as might be implied by the book’s presentation, while Seymour, who gives a less detailed account of the mathematics, offers an illuminating view of the ...”

“... the plausibility of the whole story diminished. Their genuineness had been confirmed to him by Martin Bormann. By the time of the publication he had paid at least £130,000 to meet Bormann, who was commuting between Argentina, Egypt, Paraguay, Spain and Switzerland. The difficult circumstances of Bormann’s life always made the meeting impossible, yet ...”

“... by boys with what I still think of as normal classic names: Simon, Mark, Peter, Andrew, Paul, Martin, Michael, Stephen, Richard, Robert, David. Girls’ names remained more modish: some Sarahs, Anns and Elizabeths and even some residual Marys, but also plenty of Janets, Jackies, Lisas and Debbies, who soared and plummeted through the bestseller lists in ...”

“... personal danger, and even when times were good his reforming zeal was always constrained by the King’s theological conservatism. With Henry’s death, the close shaves were apparently over and Cranmer could at last begin to build a truly reformed Church under the new Josiah, Edward VI, with the aim, as MacCulloch repeatedly documents, of making England ...”

“... like some pop-star badge, an enamel medallion exhibiting a boar – the emblem of her favourite king. To my regret, I could not make out whether she was also wearing the ring and bracelet which usually go with the medallion. Reality had outdone fiction. This little Tube scene I shall always retain as the epitome of a certain vision of Britain today – a ...”

“... There was once a king who was troubled by all the misery he observed about him. So he summoned his wise men and commanded them to inquire into its causes. The wise men duly looked into the matter, and reported back to the king that the cause of all the misery was him. So runs Bertolt Brecht’s parable of the founding in 1923 of the Frankfurt Institute of Social Research, a centre for Marxist studies endowed by a wealthy German capitalist ...”