“... Edison. Henry Ford. Benjamin Franklin. Marie Curie. Florence Nightingale. Winston Churchill. Louis Armstrong. Theodore Roosevelt.’‘You read Theodore Roosevelt’s biography when you were a kid?’‘I did, yes. There was a series. About twenty of them, I suppose. One on each. Most were about Americans. A lot of presidents. Walt Disney, I remember ...”

“... Yorker’s editor, David Remnick, called it ‘extraordinary’; the New York Times critic A.O. Scott said it was ‘essential, like water or air’; in a widely circulated blurb, Toni Morrison likened Coates to Baldwin and declared the book ‘required reading’; even Jay-Z tweeted to his millions of followers: ‘Please. read.’ For some time ...”

“... Scotty,’ though only the Yale Book records that the misquotation (he preferred ‘Beam us up, Mr Scott’) first appeared in the Aeronautical Journal in 1975.Sadly, neither volume finds room for Kirk’s other catchphrase, ‘Set phasers to stun,’ presumably because such a kindly articulation of American intergalactic colonialism doesn’t suit the spirit ...”

“... home of sorts in Dry Drayton, a fenland village north-west of Cambridge. His host was Canon Allan Armstrong, a Church of Ireland priest and a socialist who had been driven overseas by the IRA and kept an open house in the rambling Georgian rectory – ‘shabby, genteel and sublime’, as Neat describes it. Henderson was among those who moved into its thirty ...”

“... record – Bessie Smith’s classic ‘St Louis Blues’ from 1925, which featured a young Louis Armstrong playing cornet.This collision of models meant that Tippett’s music tended to develop through rupture and disjoint: the idea of combining disparate strands to form a neatly arranged whole never appealed to him. The English musical establishment thought ...”

“... Franzen’s The Corrections, starring Ewan McGregor, Maggie Gyllenhaal and Greta Gerwig, a Ridley Scott-directed pilot for a rejected show called The Vatican, and many others.After Chase shot the pilot for The Sopranos, ten months went by before HBO got back to him. Albrecht’s boss fretted about the cost. Nobody had spent $2.7 million per episode on a drama ...”

“... and diminishing food supplies. The market went ahead of the cavalry. When Crazy Horse and George Armstrong Custer confronted each other at the Battle of the Little Bighorn, it was reported to be 44°C in the shade, and Evan Connell noted in Son of the Morning Star that ‘a shrewd Yankee merchant on the Yellowstone turned a neat profit selling straw hats for ...”