“... eating ice cream; a body bearing the scrawled sign ‘This nigger tried to vote’; or the wedding ring worn by a black woman who hangs from a tree in front of a great crowd while horses graze in the background. In a 1909 article called ‘Lynching, Our National Crime’, Ida B. Wells identified another, unassimilable strangeness: ‘No other nation, civilised ...”

“... regularly depicted him striding into battle, walking a tightrope or slugging it out in the boxing ring. The image was one of perpetual motion, yet he could not move unaided: FDR was the wheelchair president. It’s important to spell out what his disability entailed. Roosevelt was stricken by polio in 1921 and never recovered the use of his legs. Every day he ...”

“... Afterwards, and for no obvious reason, he began calling friends on his mobile phone. ‘I’d just ring and say, “Hi, how are you?” – that kind of thing,’ he told me. ‘It wasn’t that I had much to say. I don’t know why, but I was starting to feel very lonely.’ His wife had already left the house when he woke the next morning. Ono had no ...”

“... from ‘hundreds and hundreds’ of less ordered pages, ‘hard drives, file folders, three-ring binders, spiral-bound notebooks and floppy disks’. Success came to Wallace early, with his first novel, The Broom of the System (1987), written while he was an English and philosophy undergraduate at Amherst. The 70-page thesis written concurrently for the ...”

“... paranoia, Israel’s war in Lebanon went from bad to worse. The massacre perpetrated by Israel’s Christian Lebanese allies in the Palestinian refugee camps of Sabra and Chatila in August 1982 dramatically stepped up both domestic and foreign opposition to the war. Begin’s response was to turn his back on his foreign critics. He appealed to the Cabinet to ...”

“... God in the real pantheism of this people-I.Fernando Pessoa, The Book of DisquietIt is the first or Christian name that counts, that is what makes one be as they are.Gertrude Stein, writing about Ulysses S. GrantIn autumn​ 1981, hot new act Prince was offered two nights at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum supporting the Rolling Stones. His first impulse was ...”

“... balanced budgets, at competitive levels of taxation. The historic commitments of both social and Christian democracy to full employment and traditional welfare services, already scaled down or cut back, would cease to have any further institutional purchase. This is a revolutionary prospect. The single obligation of the projected European Central Bank, more ...”

“... from the gloom of the transit corridor into the designer dusk of Sheremetievo airport and the ring-mail burnished rust of the ceiling’s empty pilchard tins. Vladimir Stabnikov is waiting for us. I have met him before, in England and in the Soviet Union. Small, thick-set, black-eyed, densely-bearded, restlessly rubbing his hands, inexplicably ...”

“... than a century ago – was designed to resonate with the enormous march around Moscow’s Garden Ring of 4 February 1990, against the CPSU’s monopoly on political representation. (The city government, doubtless aware of the parallel being sought, insisted it be held in the same place as the demonstration of 10 December, on an island in the centre of the ...”

“... tannin glaze of a resting Stone: Ronnie Wood morphing into Bill Wyman. A heavy silver wedding ring. The ever-present mobile phone. I’d given Mr Nice a first reading. And that’s how Marks presented himself. How he charmed the uncharmable, the warders at Terre Haute Penitentiary: his ‘usual trick of being excessively friendly and polite’. He ...”

“... before Reagan came to power led to the discovery by analysts at the National Security Agency of a ring of Soviet sleeper agents inside the United States, many of them working in federal jobs with – the Carter White House feared – access to national security data. A former military officer who worked closely with Moreau recalled the early tensions that ...”

“... derogatory sense. He’d put all his feelings, actually, onto her – his Jewish feelings about Christian women turned into a Christian woman’s feelings about a Jewish man. I thought that the great verbal violence, that ‘hymn of hate’ he ascribed to Sarah, was in him. On this occasion the rug is pulled away before ...”

“... indifferent … One of the two most powerful cities of modernity is thereby built around an opaque ring of walls, streams, roofs and trees whose own centre is no more than an evaporated notion, subsisting here, not in order to irradiate power, but to give to the entire urban movement the support of its central emptiness.Eleven months ago, the principal denizen ...”

“... solos. The record producer opted for the first take – lyrics and laughs make cash registers ring, which sounds like a business motto. In Nineteen Eighty-Four, a pop music machine cranks out rhymed songs non-stop – ‘for me’, Waller might well have moaned.The demand for fresh material for Waller was largely filled by ‘novelty songs’, as this ...”

“... west, leaves us frustrated. The marzipan-and-betel-juice grandeur of St Pancras is impenetrable, ring-fenced, security-guarded. You can visit the old station on Saturdays and Sundays at 11 a.m. and 1.30 p.m. And of course I do. In recent times, the vast corridors, decaying public rooms and dramatic staircase have been a favoured set for fashion shoots and ...”