“... was apparently untroubled by the conversion.) Barack went to a mission school run by Seventh-Day Adventists, walking three miles but, unlike his classmates, wearing shoes. His father told him: ‘I want you to go beyond where I am.’ On returning home each day, the boy was required to recite sums to his father while ...”

“... to disrupt the process, even stop up the hole with chewing gum but resist it. Another sunny warm day but with a strong wind that ruffles the lavender (and makes landing for the hornets tricky). 1 August. A propos Jeffrey Archer. I am rereading the Lyttelton Hart-Davis Letters and come across this remark by George Lyttelton: ‘Sprinters always try to beat ...”

“... not remember that she sang all night and has to face her landlady and her fellow boarders the next day is a piece of dynamite. In a society where, as Miss Hearne says, men are gods, how do you go about dramatising them? In a society where women’s vulnerability is open and public, where women are alert to their shifting position, watchful, under the bony ...”

“... of preaching about civility in the press. The most fatuous of the irreconcilables, Bermondsey’s Neil Coyle, took to bombarding Corbyn’s phone with late-night screeds. Andy McDonald, who served in the shadow cabinet, observes that such behaviour ‘would not be tolerated in normal workplaces’, and it was exceptional even in the fractious world of British ...”

“... as the Social Sciences and Humanities are incorporated into the new curriculum: a series of two-day courses in market research and letter-writing skills. If management has been conquering the university in recent years, it has also found its own uses for that old totem of liberal culture known as the book. Books on management aren’t just pouring out: they ...”

“... hair, specs, it makes no difference. Howard is still the traditionalist, the 25 spliffs a day man. Everything up to now has been a scam, why not this autobiography? How, after so many years of abuse, could the memory deposits be trusted? Marks is that exception, the man of the Sixties who was here, there and everywhere, and who has the perfect recall ...”

“... whose noble aversions, ignored by Republican France, were all of a piece and apparent on day one in the manger. Last summer, as tempers were cooling, the Algerian writer Kamel Daoud turned up the heat again with his extraordinary novel, Meursault, contre-enquête. Daoud’s narrator, Haroun, is in his twenties in July 1962 when he kills a French ...”

“... a criminous warren, twinned with the Jago, to a user-friendly film location. The sort of place Neil Jordan could shoot The Crying Game without paying protection money. A million ghosted memoirs (golden-hearted mum, dad on the trot from the Army, thieving from bombsites, clip around the ear from PC Plod, Borstal, Parkhurst, kneecapped by Ronnie, joins ...”

“... alliance. ‘She was what the country needed at the time,’ as my old dad is still saying to this day. And so, ‘in the place of a popular rupture, a populist unity.’Labour, meanwhile, had brought its failure on itself: this is what Hall calls the central ‘contradiction within social democracy’, ‘the principal key to the whole rightward ...”

“... of it. In the first place I like to be reminded that things are happening in the solar system. If Neil Spencer didn’t tell me in the Observer that Mercury is ‘retrograde’ – i.e. moving up to overtake us on the inside lane – I would have no idea that Mercury was doing anything at all in our blinded night sky, going forwards, going backwards, or ...”

“... in the spectacular palace of the emperor Huayna Cápac. But his expedition of 1540 from present-day Louisiana to the Carolinas amounted to a series of disastrous confrontations with Native groups. He ended his days trying to pass as a god before a local chief, only to be exposed when he failed to dry up the Mississippi, into which his corpse was ...”

“... Francis Stuart to a party in Dublin commemorating a party he had given in Berlin on St Patrick’s Day 1941. I wondered, when I read it, why Francis had sent this. Over the years he had invited me to several events, but he had never had invitations printed. I wondered if it was clear to him, as it was to me, that the invitation was a direct provocation. He was ...”

“... One reason she wants to stay in the neighbourhood is that her church is here. It was a stifling day during one of the heatwaves that have smothered the city this summer. We could hear the children, just home from school, splashing and giggling in a cold bath. ‘I think about the health of the children all the time,’ she told me.She and her children have ...”

“... the lack of public transport doesn’t help. I heard of one case in which Amazon was offering a day’s work on zero-hours contracts at one of its nearby warehouses. They only let you know on the day itself whether or not you’re needed, but the text message they send out arrives too late for you to get the first ...”

“... land. The fishermen were paid a share of the profits made from each three-week trip; after a three-day break they went to sea again, a rhythm that sent pulses of cash-rich fishermen racing to the fleshpots and trinketries of Freeman Street, the backbone of the Victorian town, which ran from the docks to the Marsh districts where the fishermen lived. They would ...”