“... punishment in the United States subsists – inescapably – in a miasma of race. The Honorable John H. Land in 1977 presided over the trial of a black man called William Brooks, whose case McFeely follows. Land is the son of a prominent local dignitary who had seen to the lynching of an adolescent boy 65 years earlier. The barefoot ‘little black ...”

“... police pepper-sprayed students as they protested silently against higher tuition fees at UC Davis. A subsequent investigation, forced on the authorities because a student’s photo of the scene had gone viral, established that the police had been sent in by the university chancellor, Linda Katehi. In a later statement, Katehi explained that she had ...”

“... vides was published in 1974, which is late for the scholarship pupil plot in Britain and Ireland. John McGahern, Edna O’Brien, Richard Hoggart, Raymond Williams: they were all born between the end of the First World War and the early 1930s, and published their stories of class alienation in the late 1950s and early 1960s. It’s a bit late, too, for the ...”

“... three acknowledged illegitimate children. ‘I wonder what Lady Wilde thought of her husband?’ John Butler Yeats wrote to his son in 1921. ‘When she was Miss Elgee, Mrs Butt found her with her husband when her circumstances were not doubtful, and told my mother about it – so that she could afford to be wise and tolerant.’ (Mrs Butt’s husband was ...”

“... in 2009 to mark the fortieth anniversary of Cottam power station in Nottinghamshire, Robert Davis quotes one of the employees: There was so much wastage during the CEGB days. It was like they had money to burn. The stores were always full and we had spares for everything. Bureaucracy was part of the problem. If you signed stuff out of the stores, even ...”

“... decent publicist, this time van Middelaar places at the head of his book an epigraph from Miles Davis. It reads: ‘I’ll play it first and tell you what it is later.’ The politics of the EU in a one-liner.But the price for these moments of frankness has risen. Along with acknowledgment of the ‘coercive consensus’ of the Council meetings, the ...”

“... or gifts only 43 times since 2015, according to available records. By way of contrast, Robert Davis, the Conservative deputy leader of neighbouring Westminster Council, was entertained or received gifts 514 times in the same period. But in the days after the fire, Paget-Brown was portrayed, pretty much universally, as a greedy toff who was happy to put ...”