“... show wasn’t very interesting to a seven-year-old and, though they sometimes had pop stars on the bill, it was mostly dancers and novelty acts. Soon my loyalties switched to Juke Box Jury, where you could hear the latest releases and the panellists were slender and nice-looking, with beehive hairdos and Mod dresses, like my cousin Madeleine. They weren’t as ...”

“... Doris was​ in her early forties when I arrived in my vile mustard-coloured coat with a brown velvet collar, my first ‘grown-up’ item of clothing. It was hung in the airing cupboard alongside some marijuana that Doris had grown in the garden her first summer in the house and was now drying out. I never wore the coat again, though we did smoke the dope ...”

“... club in the old Limehouse Town Hall. I attended this public debate and heard the Hackney solicitor Bill Parry-Davies describe, quietly, remorselessly, how, after a series of mysterious fires, Dalston Lane had lost its Victorian theatre and sections of Georgian terrace, facilitating the new transport hub that would service the vital axes, south to the ...”

“... of the kind of people who have expressed public support for UBI – Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, Bill Gates, Eric Schmidt, Hillary Clinton – has led to scepticism on the left. The Basic Income Earth Network is so troubled by the free-for-all libertarian version of its ideas that it has adopted a resolution rejecting the anti-welfare state version of ...”

“... you weren’t ruthless enough.’ When Eden offered him the Exchequer, Macmillan did a Gordon Brown: insisting that ‘as chancellor, I must be undisputed head of the home front, under you’ and that there could be no question of his predecessor, Butler, being accorded the title of deputy prime minister. Barely a year later, after the Suez debacle, he ...”

“... mother, who responded to the 11-year-old’s opening lines – ‘“Oh, how do you do, Mrs Brown?” said Mrs Tompkins. “If only I had known you were going to call I should have tidied up the drawing-room”’ – by icily observing: ‘Drawing-rooms are always tidy.’ That put a stop to fiction for a time. But Lucretia Jones’s capacity to freeze ...”

“... a major overhaul in funding and provision. Andy Burnham, health secretary in the dying days of the Brown government, proposed a National Care Service, to be funded by a compulsory levy on estates. This remains the closest Britain has come to a solution. The plan collapsed in a cynical act of political arson, as Osborne saw a potent campaign tool in the ...”

“... build a post-apocalyptic bunker in a remote part of New Zealand’s South Island was rejected, but Bill Gates, now only the world’s eighth richest person, has his own island in Belize. Oracle’s Larry Ellison, the world’s fourth richest person, owns 98 per cent of the Hawaiian island of Lanai, resort hotels and all, which he’s made an inhospitable place ...”

“... abolitionist, to replace Andrew Jackson, the slave owner known as the Indian Killer, on the $20 bill. Steve Mnuchin, the secretary of the treasury, states that this will not be possible until at least 2028 and probably not at all. Trump has a portrait of Jackson hanging in the Oval Office.*As his attacks on Cummings and Baltimore continue, the president ...”

“... calculating style of their son. Dunham was a resourceful single mother attracted to exotic brown men. Having returned to the East-West Center in 1963 to study anthropology, she met Lolo Soetoro, a Javanese graduate student who was easygoing and patient – the opposite of Barack Sr. They were married in March 1964. Little more than a year later, after ...”

“... no food to be had, and so walk back to the square where we have coffee and a sandwich. Paying the bill, I ask the woman at the counter the whereabouts of the sea, and she points me down the road. It’s now about eleven o’clock. And as I write these prosaic details down – the cashier, the time, the people sitting outside – I realise it’s in an effort ...”

“... between the living and the dead, and a faith in the American project that turns not just on the Bill of Rights but on the acquired faith of the 19th century, and even the years up to 1945, that the project was entered into in common. (It’s worth recalling that Didion was ten when the war ended, with a father in uniform. You can feel that young mood in her ...”

“... paid Arar millions of dollars in compensation. As recently as the beginning of April, in contrast, Bill Rammell, our Foreign Office minister with responsibility for the sharing of information about terrorism, visited Damascus despite the disappearance in Syria weeks before of two British citizens. The Foreign Office, attempting to reassure the families that ...”

“... talking, honest politics’, the slogan goes). For the latter, the worry is not simply Corbyn’s brown jackets and red ties, but the instinctive feeling that he would look out of place outside Downing Street. (Anyone who rules instinct out as a force in politics is naive.) Corbynites would no doubt reply, with some justice, that we need to reconceptualise ...”

“... its massive steel doors wide open and its landing ramp fully extended beyond the bow. Major Bill Kerr, commander of 265 Battery and my father’s friend, stood on the lip of the ramp. When he felt the ship’s stern shudder as it scraped the bottom, he stepped forward into what he thought would be ankle-deep water but turned out to come up to his ...”