“... Sometimes it was big and thick and exhausting-looking. Sometimes it was shorter and lighter, in a bob. Usually you saw roots, a thick black skunk-stripe even. ‘Being a bleached blonde for so many years,’ Harry writes, ‘has made me acutely aware of what healthy hair looks like.’ There’s a picture in the book of a family Christmas in New Jersey, with ...”

“... Finer made recordings and live performances with the Hamburg-based ‘swamp pop legend’ DM Bob. And, driving them on, setting the pace, in the orange jumpsuit of a Guantánamo veteran extraordinarily rendered into the North Circular Road hinterland, was the Deptford percussionist David Aylward. His strident hi-vis disguise, colour co-ordinated with the ...”

“... imports of these irresistible luxuries boomed too. On the whole, as the economic historian Ralph Davis concludes, ‘the consumer paid what he was asked.’ In any case, the government would have been miffed if the revenue had been seriously damaged, for these were still primarily revenue-raising taxes to pay for foreign wars. The effect on political ...”

“... held themselves aloof from those with darker skin. In his 1945 novel, If He Hollers Let Him Go, Bob Jones, a black ‘leaderman’ in an LA shipyard, is at a dinner party with a group of decorous middle-class blacks who ask his opinion on how to ‘integrate the people of this ghetto into the life of the community’. ‘Well, now,’ he replies, ‘I think ...”

“... from cranky freelancer to feted urban guru (‘the Mother Theresa of urbanism’, as Mike Davis, a rare dissenter from the church of St Jane, once put it) came about through her encounter with the slum, as a concept and, less and less over time, as a reality. It was the slum, in the eyes of the planners of Radiant Garden City Beautiful, that made ...”

“... sang at Carnegie Hall, where the adoring audience included Marilyn Monroe, Richard Burton, Bette Davis, Julie Andrews, Debbie Reynolds and Mickey Rooney. The recording of that concert spent thirteen weeks at number one on the Billboard album charts. Like ‘taking nineteen hundred wake-up pills’ was the way she once described the thrill of hearing an ...”

“... a lecture delivered on Irish radio in 1995 and published in The Great Irish Famine: The Thomas Davis Lecture Series, James Donnelly remarked thatthroughout the rest of the Famine years, the Gregory clause or ‘Gregoryism’ became a byword for the worst miseries of the disaster – eviction, exile, disease and death. When in 1874 Canon John ...”

“... Dreaming in French: The Paris Years of Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy, Susan Sontag and Angela Davis (2012) – highly recommended. From Paris, it was on to New York. Meeting Partisan Review’s co-editor William Phillips at a party, Sontag, now a single mother living on a shoestring, got right to business: ‘How do you write a review for Partisan ...”

“... Florida from 150 years of racial discrimination’. The judge issued a stay. But Governor Bob Graham, a former opponent of the death penalty, who, McFeely suggests, balanced his progressive policies on race with toughness on crime, refused clemency. Graham’s behaviour was typical of the new South. Bill Clinton’s followed the same pattern. In his ...”

“... in her words. You’ve heard it from time to time in the movie tones of Marlene Dietrich or Bette Davis. It was late, I’d been in bed for some time. I pretended to be asleep when she walked into the dark room and told me. I didn’t know what to say, and I was frightened by what would happen to the voice if it was encouraged to go on. Besides, I had a ...”