“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... be a way of masking the failings of our political systems, from which far-right populism emerged. Bill Clinton’s former secretary of state Madeleine Albright bemoaned the implications of a Trump presidency for American global leadership in Fascism: A Warning (2018), one of a glut of such books that followed the populist election upsets of 2016, without ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... the Atlantic Station in Atlanta and the Luxor Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas, where it shares a bill with the comedian Carrot Top and Menopause: The Musical. ‘Titanic’: The Experience is the bigger show; among other treats, it ‘immerses visitors in the hundred-year story as never experienced before’ – an unhappy metaphor perhaps – by allowing ...”

“... to mind an image drawn from another sport: Lucy endlessly lining up the football for Charlie Brown to kick, only to pull it away at the last moment and send him flying. Obama did the opposite of that. He went out of his way to ensure the ball was where it needed to be. All she had to do was swing. And she whiffed. The tug-of-war between the two sides of ...”

“... known as redlining – that had especially pernicious effects in Northern cities. The GI Bill was locally administered, which gave racist petty bureaucrats every opportunity to discriminate.It would be easier to come to terms with the past if Americans could contrive to label one particular period or decision as the paradigmatic crime of a criminal ...”

“... through Facebook accounts, until a second message told me he had swapped his father’s surname, Brown, for his mother’s, Lindsay. I typed in ‘William Lindsay’ and there he was: a boy in a EA7 bomber jacket with headphones round his neck, flaming hair and a lopsided smile.When I got back to Glasgow, I learned why my contact had risked his job to give ...”

“... has taken the opportunity to talk openly about the worrying thoughts in our heads as we drain the brown fluid from the meat in a polystyrene punnet. Obesity, heart disease, animal welfare, greenhouse gases, the nagging intimation that we can’t go on as we have without parts of the food chain shearing away: Defra grasps that our misgivings, like our ...”