“... sexuality – he had been mugged after meeting a man on Clapham Common – he was replaced by Alun Michael. Michael was considered a New Labour placeman, particularly by Morgan, who stood against him and lost. Michael decided to lead a minority government rather than enter into a ...”

“... your lover) and to be offering his publishers a valuable franchise along the lines of the late Michael Dibdin’s Aurelio Zen. From the start, it would have been a frail scheme to rely on. The book’s prologue, in which a Korean labourer, falsely accused of killing a young woman, is beheaded in front of Minami by a military policeman on the day of ...”

“... following sentence? ‘A fortune-teller once read my cards and said that if it wasn’t for a tiny black cloud hanging over me I could do great things and not only for my country but for all mankind.’ Instantly, a person opens before us like a quick wound: probably a man (that slight vibration of a swagger), grandiose in aspiration but glued to a petty ...”

“... is a regular visitor to the boxing gym on the upper floor, where the athletic young men – mostly black and Hispanic – spar in a raised ring, thrash oblong leather bags, pump metal, skip rope, and stalk their own images in three or four large mirrors, with a fury that must be reducing the life of the building still further. To stand at the centre of the gym ...”

“... that he must tell her what kind of hat to wear in London: the safe headgear, he writes, ‘is black hat – black feather – all the best people are in black – white: some women, but not ladies exactly, are in bright colours.’ (What sort of creation do you suppose poor Emma was ...”

“... Trump Village, Shore Haven, Beach Haven – for veterans returning to Brooklyn. According to Michael D’Antonio’s delightful new biography, one of Trump père’s schemes was to create an ‘independent company to buy used equipment’ – everything needed on a building site, excavators, tile machines – which he would then lease to his own projects ...”

“... had bred 2123 dogs and owned 2696.They are often like this, the ‘Doggy People’ who feature in Michael Worboys’s study of twenty ‘eminent and not so eminent Victorians who were the modern dog’s makers’: muscular, energetic, eccentric, polymathic. Kathleen Pelham-Clinton, the Duchess of Newcastle, who imported the borzoi breed from Russia into ...”

“... is another fifty-year-old Brit’, only to be informed by the department secretary: ‘He’s a black cowboy!’ (Everett had worked as a rancher and mule trainer.) In his essay ‘Hidden Name and Complex Fate’, Ralph Ellison, who reduced his middle name (Waldo) to a ‘simple and mysterious “W.”’, argued that African Americans – ‘especially if ...”

“... created one about Rhys. Postures: Jean Rhys in the Modern World, recently on display at London’s Michael Werner Gallery, does not try to cover all Rhys’s glimmers in and out of vivacity. Nevertheless there is a spectral quality to this ‘collective portrait’, which includes no actual portrait of Rhys herself. Paintings, sculptures, photographs – and ...”

“... which made King a national figure; the confrontation in the streets of Birmingham between young Black demonstrators and ‘Bull’ Connor’s dogs and fire hoses; and the march for voting rights from Selma to Montgomery. Eig’s admiration for King is obvious, but he is not reluctant to point out failures, such as the Chicago Freedom Movement and the Poor ...”

“... genuine first, and her bid for success surfed on some pretty heady generational idealism: she is a black woman who became the most powerful media figure in America, a billionaire, a hero to tens of millions of people, maybe the prime example, before Obama was Obama, of what strides a black person might have made since Civil ...”

“... their convicts tractable and discourage them from trying to escape. Even the serial runaway ‘Black Caesar’ could sustain his liberty only briefly, and then by plundering the supplies of convicts or Aborigines. When the Van Diemonian settlements were subjected to the same terrifying neglect by the mother country which had brought Port Jackson to near ...”

“... from a boy of 15 the flirtatiousness would be much more shocking. All productions put him in black leather and a little cap such as Orton himself used to wear. Here too an outfit that is not so self-conscious would serve the play better. The more ordinary it is the more shocking it will seem. 3 February. One of the cards of condolence we get on Anne’s ...”

“... probably – but when you look at photographs of Tonks from the time (blonde bobbed hair, black sunglasses: pure mod), it’s hard not to see the whole project as a rebellion against staid English dreariness. The Radiophonic Workshop, which closed in 1998, had exactly the legacy Tonks imagined. Derbyshire remains best known for the Doctor Who ...”

“... ex-friend Steve Bannon snuggles up in the address book next to Debonnaire von Bismarck. Conrad Black (with more than a dozen numbers) is next to Tony Blair (home number only) and the former mayor of New York Michael Bloomberg (who also lived on Tom Wolfe’s street). There are lots of British socialites (brought to him ...”