“... by the conversion.) Barack went to a mission school run by Seventh-Day Adventists, walking three miles but, unlike his classmates, wearing shoes. His father told him: ‘I want you to go beyond where I am.’ On returning home each day, the boy was required to recite sums to his father while standing by the dinner table. If he was slightly less than ...”

“... at the public library,’ he said. The university is in the twin cities of Champaign-Urbana, 130 miles south of Chicago and 180 miles north of St Louis. It’s a research university that sprouted in the middle of corn and soybean fields, and still grows a corn crop on campus. The sky, like the sky in Tucson, Arizona, where ...”

“... of lynchers’, turned to it for inspiration, drawing on the work of Black writers such as Richard Wright and Chester Himes. America is a ‘battlefield’, Simone de Beauvoir wrote, ‘and you can only become passionate about the battle it is waging with itself, in which the stakes are beyond measure.’Since Beauvoir made this observation in 1947, at ...”

“... of the type we are living through now – much of Northern Europe was buried beneath miles of ice. Sea levels were hundreds of feet lower than they are today, and there was a thousand-mile-wide land bridge between Russia and North America. According to some palaeo-climatologists, 700 million years ago, during a period known as the Varangian (for ...”

“... Confederacy; a thousand American troops were killed or wounded. In the periodisation laid out in Richard White’s Middle Ground (1991), the irreversible decline of Indigenous peoples only set in at the end of the War of 1812, when ‘they could no longer pose a major threat or be a major asset to an empire or a republic, and even their economic consequence ...”

“... a ‘pre-emptive strike’ against North Korea’s nuclear reactors at Yongbyon, about sixty miles north of Pyongyang. Then, at the last minute, Jimmy Carter got North Korea to agree to a complete freeze on activity at the Yongbyon complex, and a Framework Agreement was signed in October 1994. The Republican Right railed against this for the next six ...”

“... statistics. In 18 days the engineers and fifteen thousand other friendlies had cleared four square miles of forest, blown up 2500 bunkers and tunnels, evacuated 5987 inhabitants and burned every ‘structure’ standing above ground, for the loss of 72 Americans and 11 ARVN. What had taken the Vietminh and then the Vietcong 20 years to build had been destroyed ...”

“... rigour; but it lies discreetly behind a non-academic joyfulness. The French used to celebrate Richard Cobb as le grand Cobb; and perhaps it isn’t too early to hail his successor as le grand Robb. Of Robb’s 19 chapters, three are set in the late 18th century, six in the 19th, eight in the 20th and two in the 21st. They feature many of the best-known ...”

“... these days has become a trickle – a trickle supervised in the Express’s case by an owner, Richard Desmond, who made a lot of his money from masturbatory aids such as telephone chat-lines and Asian Babes magazine. We should, however, beware of the temptation to chart a nation’s moral decline through the personalities of its newspaper ...”

“... the Charter on the ground that it had been extorted by force. By riding flat out, forty or fifty miles a day, messengers reached Rome in time for the pope to dispatch his papal bull dated 24 August. By late August or early September, the barons in turn had decided on the extraordinary step of electing Prince Louis of France, the eldest son of Philip ...”

“... on which African Americans stood. ‘White people had Judy Garland. We had Nina,’ the comedian Richard Pryor said. Simone’s voice answered the radical call for a profound articulation of the Black Tradition and incidentally made her ‘the patron saint of rebellion’, according to Crouch. Her singing, an African-American critic wrote in the Philadelphia ...”

“... Frontier. O’Dwyer too was not slow to send in the RAF to bomb rioters in Gujranwala, about fifty miles north of Amritsar on 14 April, the day after the massacre. Gerard Wathen’s wife, Melicent, a more bellicose character than her husband, recorded in her diary the relief that the British all felt when they saw RAF planes patrolling overhead (Lt Col ...”

“... George Avakian, the head of popular music at Columbia Records who had signed Dave Brubeck and Miles Davis, heard Shankar play at New York Town Hall and invited him to record for the label, which resulted in The Sounds of India. Also present was Richard Bock, head of Pacific Jazz in Los Angeles, who recorded Shankar when ...”

“... But they also worked closely with governments in Asia, Africa and Latin America. In Puerto Rico, Richard Bolin of Arthur D. Little advised the US colonial administration and was involved in setting up a factory enclave subject to minimal regulations in 1947 – he called it Operation Bootstrap. The enclave became a model for export processing zones, or free ...”

“... He was a Catholic during years in which Catholics could not attend university, or live within ten miles of London, or (in one of the most bizarre legislative expressions of Protestant paranoia) own a horse worth more than £5.Pope was born in 1688, the year of the Glorious Revolution, which for Catholics was rather less glorious than it was to their ...”