“... Reconstruction never ended; it has simply changed form. Nor has it been confined to the South: the North has had its own, scarcely less virulent form of white supremacy. The struggle to achieve full enfranchisement for black people in the United States has produced many martyrs: Medgar Evers and Martin Luther King; James Chaney, Michael Schwerner and Andrew ...”

“... of private greed, vested interest corruption and class favouritism that were levelled against North, Pitt, Sidmouth and Wellington, as well as John Major, Neil Hamilton and Alan B’Stard, and that did most to destroy the Tory regime in 1830 and again in 1997.The new trade border in the Irish Sea may well prove ...”

“... Nazis, as was the case in most branches of the federal bureaucracy. Its first president, Otto John, had been active in the resistance, escaping to London after the failed putsch of 1944. In 1954 he popped up in East Berlin and revealed in a press conference that the soon-to-be West German Ministry of Defence and the foreign intelligence service that was ...”

“... pomp nor sidelong voyaging.Agnetha, Björn, Benny and Anni-Frid hailed from the exotic frozen north, a Sweden then known to outsiders chiefly for Ingmar Bergman, tinned herring and a relaxed attitude towards pornography. The band became a vehicle for a kind of wholesome perversity, a nonconformist conformism: two picture-perfect couples shattered by ...”

“... to tell the tale.Emecheta was born in Lagos in July 1944, the wettest month at latitudes just north of the equator. Her father was a railway worker who had fought with the British in Burma and her mother was a seamstress. She was born eight weeks early, a baby not much bigger than a rat, and a girl when every newlywed wished for a boy. She survived by ...”

“... all who promoted evil in this country.’ We were at Mar-a-Lago for the premiere of a film about John Eastman, one of the lawyers who tried to overturn the 2020 election results. Buses were bringing in guests from the Hilton West Palm Beach; ‘red-carpet opportunities’ with Rudy Giuliani had been advertised. The film came out on the anniversary of the ...”

“... in 1983 whether James was ‘two kings or one?’, so different were his historical reputations north and south of the border. Wormald and other historians have done much to establish James’s political agility and challenge the homophobia and xenophobia that skewed interpretations of him alive and dead. But the caricature of a weak king drooling over his ...”

“... the centre aisle, smack in front of the altar. There’s another much plainer tomb c.1478 on the north wall, carved with a symmetrically ruched frieze of draperies round the rim which seems very sophisticated for a village church, and more Italian than English. Fragments of wall-paintings include one of Clothing the Naked, in which a man is taking off or ...”

“... Nor had abortion been a partisan cause. Many Democrats, particularly Catholic voters in the north-east, were pro-life. Prominent Republicans, including (for much of their careers) Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, were often pro-choice on principle – they were, after all, meant to be the defenders of individual liberty. Many states would probably ...”

“... passed Neasden. When the first railways were built in England, they reached out to London from the north, not the other way round. London had no need of the railways to get where it wanted to go. It was already there. But when it came to the Underground, London did reach out, to the countryside. Edward Watkin, who became chairman of the Metropolitan in ...”

“... that the virus was artificially made infectious to humans in a joint effort by labs in Wuhan, North Carolina and Maryland; that Anthony Fauci, America’s Covid-19 point man, was hiding the fact that it was virtually harmless for his own financial benefit. ‘Plan-demic!’ yelled thousands in unison. ‘Plan-demic! Plan-demic!’After Corbyn had ...”

“... on the evening of 7 November 1940, at a dance at the Crystal Ballroom in Fargo, North Dakota. It’s the closing number, rousing but rough, as though they had no formal arrangement; they never did record it commercially. (Ellington recorded it in 1928.) The tempo is uncommonly fast for this song, they abandon most of the melody, and ...”

“... the killing of Reeva Steenkamp, Judge Thokozile Matilda Masipa made her way across courtroom GD at North Gauteng High Court in Pretoria slowly and haltingly. She suffers from severe arthritis and for the duration of the trial she sat on an orthopaedic chair, much smaller than the vast leather seats of the two assessors on either side. Judge Masipa’s entry ...”

“... with which he wound up his adolescence recalls something of Kepler’s horoscope of himself: Eric John Ernest Hobsbawm, a tall, angular, dangly, ugly, fair-haired fellow of 18½, quick on the uptake, with a considerable if superficial stock of general knowledge and a lot of original ideas, general and theoretical. An incorrigible striker of attitudes, which ...”

“... was: that bloodied face, the hero’s grimace, the whole thing like a campaign advert directed by John Ford. In Milwaukee, I bumped into Robert Auth, a member of the New Jersey General Assembly, who began telling me and a Swedish journalist that the Republican Party had always been all about surviving and staying on course. ‘We’re shocked,’ he ...”