“... acts, artists presumed dead or missing in action, for Norma Desmond divas and the real Michael Jackson, a trembling skin-graft mask cursed with eternal youth. Parrot-scream arias and the cough of angry engines, as punters try to exit the gridlocked car park, carry across a broad expanse of oily water. Thames, Amazon, Congo: crumbling regimes like nothing ...”

“... a shifting and, for much of America’s existence, expanding boundary. Grandin quotes a letter Clare Boothe Luce sent in the 1940s to her husband, Henry, the publisher of Time, in which she wrote that, with the end of the country’s territorial expansion, America could survive as a nation only by preserving its ‘racial and cultural homogeneity’ with ...”

“... and had been offered an internship in New York.‘Her soul was of a kind,’ said Betty Jackson, speaking of her sister Mary Mendy, Khadija’s mother. Their relative Demel Carayol, also an artist and a former member of the group Soul II Soul, was full of memories the day I tracked him down in Palmers Green. ‘Mary came to the UK with the help of ...”