“... in downtown Montgomery. Stand in the pulpit at Dexter Avenue King Memorial Baptist Church where Dr Martin Luther King Jr preached.’ My wife and I did stand in the pulpit where Dr King preached, and sat in the church office where he and his colleagues planned the bus boycott, and, at the insistence of our guide, had our pictures taken behind the lectern from ...”

“... as well as satirise the paranoia which was exacerbated by the assassinations of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King in 1968 and seemed to find its justification in the Watergate revelations. Richard Condon’s novel The Manchurian Candidate – an eerie anticipation published in 1959 and then turned into a Hollywood film which appeared during the Cuban ...”

“... us by this telling of losses and gains. In Russell Hoban’s previous, much-admired novel, Riddley Walker, the narrator, ‘connection man’ for a Kent settlement far in the future which lies beyond some obscure cataclysm, agonises in his residual English about the problem of writing. ‘I dont have nothing only words to put down on paper. Its so hard. Some ...”

“... is problematical. This book packs some of the nastiest shocks since Richard Walker in The Savile Row Story (1988) disinterred a Lloyd’s Weekly News headline on a sweatshop exposure of 1892: ‘The Duke of York’s Trowsers Made in a Fever Room.’ Chenoune is a French fashion journalist whose book was supported by the Fédération des ...”

“... to Ireland was so suppressed as to be historically impossible. It is one of the many merits of Martin Adeney and John Lloyd’s excellent The Miners’ Strike that it, too, has a strong sense of history. As it needs to, since so many of the actors in the 1984-85 miners’ strike were all too conscious of their historical role: Mrs Thatcher and the ...”

“... Everything in Cloud Atlas seems nicked: the post-apocalyptic world from Russell Hoban’s Riddley Walker, the political ideas from Naomi Klein and George Monbiot. As a result it’s far too cartoonish and second-hand to have any real bite: it’s like looking into a snowglobe for a deep moral message. Like Cloud Atlas, Mitchell’s sixth novel is a ...”

“... the moving vehicle at the foot of the Gallery steps. Up to the age of 95 he remained a tireless walker, maintaining correctly that there was no law of trespass in the English judicial system, and always furnished with the prescriptive sixpence to tender to some indignant landed proprietor in full satisfaction of damage if any. In this alert longevity the ...”

“... made a decent living writing plays for BBC television and radio. (The first, The Fall of Kelvin Walker, starred Corin Redgrave, bizarrely feminised by Glass as ‘Corinne’ in his text and ‘Connie’ in his index.) In this way, Gray began slowly to build up a reputation in his home country, while the leaking of fragments of Lanark to literary magazines ...”

“... to Lorde’s decision to come out publicly as a lesbian. She returned to New York shortly before Martin Luther King was assassinated and began teaching in public schools and colleges. In 1969 Black and Puerto Rican students at the City College of New York demanded that public colleges change their admissions procedures to ensure that student intake reflected ...”

“... in New York’s Newsday, Pinckney has been scathing about ‘blackwomanist’ heroine Alice Walker, calling her much-loved depictions of black folks discovering themselves through social engagement ‘terrible ... mindless reformulations of clichés’. Provocative of him. However, it is one thing to criticise what one sees as poor art or bad behaviour ...”

“... House of Commons were in revolt, and early in 1986 she was forced to resign in favour of Mr Peter Walker. Traditional “one nation” Toryism reasserted itself.’ The third. ‘The second Thatcher Government set about establishing a police state and mounted savage attacks on socialist local authorities and militant unions like the mine-workers. The ...”

“... them. One must acknowledge, however, that Richard Cobb is not Frank Kermode, nor Angus Wilson D.P. Walker. I had come knowing what Britain’s preconceived ideas were: her pragmatism and refusal of abstraction, her solitary traditions and diehard taste for erudition and travail honnête, however ungratifying; knowing, too, that my stock of clichés would ...”

“... secret back-channel talks with Catholic priests, the Derry businessman Brendan Duddy, and Martin McGuinness of Sinn Féin. After Mountbatten’s murder in August 1979 and the killing, hours later, of 18 soldiers at Warrenpoint – the army’s heaviest single loss in Northern Ireland – Thatcher asked Maurice Oldfield, the recently retired head of ...”

“... said to have ‘secret passages towards the water’. Shakespeare bought it for £140 from Henry Walker, ‘citizen and minstrel of London’. The deed of sale is dated 10 March 1613: he put down £80 and the following day signed a mortgage agreement with Walker for the remaining £60. Whether Shakespeare ever lived in ...”

“... George Floyd was choked to death on a Minneapolis sidewalk; the novel itself begins weeks after Martin Luther King was assassinated in April 1968, and concerns twin girls who saw their own father lynched. ‘I wanted to write a book that was not just about Black pain,’ Bennett continued, ‘but also about Black love.’ Her novel, which has been at the ...”