“... to alms would reverberate for the next eighty years, most famously through Roosevelt and, later, Martin Luther King’s social gospel sermons. Bryan’s spirit remained vital until Ronald Reagan finally dropped the curtain on all that pandering. Still, the Populists looked backwards as much as they anticipated the future. Their common man lived in the ...”

“... knowledge’. It won 7 per cent of Swedish votes in the 2009 European elections.When Daniel Ek and Martin Lorentzon founded Spotify in 2006, they were adamant that the company had to offer a free service. Neither of them had worked in music before. Ek was a 23-year-old programmer from Rågsved, a suburb of Stockholm. He had already built an online advertising ...”

“... after the Cold War’. In addition to Bradbury’s invented personages the conferees include Martin Amis, Günter Grass and Susan Sontag (she skips one of the later conferences in the narrative, on the grounds that there is something more interesting going on in Northern Italy). Bradbury’s Villa Barolo is funded by the American Magno Foundation ...”

“... supply of exotic analogies for America’s long-running civil wars. ‘Violence never wins,’ Mike Pence announced when the House reconvened on the evening of 6 January. ‘Freedom wins. And this is still the people’s house.’ The vice president was followed by other Republicans keen to distance themselves from Trump and the ‘basket of ...”

“... He married his cousin Mary ‘Minnie’ Sedgwick, and set to work fathering six children: Martin, Arthur, Nelly, Maggie, Fred and Hugh. Appointed the first headmaster of the newly established Wellington College, he made a reputation as a personality in the Arnoldian mould (his sermons were collected and published under the title Boy Life, Its ...”

“... 23 March 1989 Stanley Pons, chairman of the department of chemistry at the University of Utah, and Martin Fleischmann, a collaborator who had recently retired from his professorship at the University of Southampton, held a press conference under the University’s auspices. They announced that they had made nuclear fusion occur in an electric cell at ordinary ...”

“... Raymond Williams but Bernard Dix of NUPE and Jack Adams, Convenor at BL, Longbridge; not only Martin Jacques, editor of Marxism Today, but Peter Carter, UCATT regional organiser; not only Royden Harrison, professor of social history at Warwick, but Jack Jones and Stan Newens MP; not only Robin Blackburn of New Left Review but ...”

“... Day, he called Blair House, where Reagan was sleeping, with exciting news about progress. Mike Deaver, the president-elect’s aide, told Carter it was too soon to wake him. At 8 o’clock, when Deaver finally tried to rouse the new president, telling him it would soon be time to be sworn in, Reagan groaned: ‘Do I have to?’ On the way to the ...”

“... effort to try and help. Instead, I think I just became an embarrassment to them.’ Brigadier Mike Smith, who commanded the Battalion on Tumbledown, denies this. He was quoted in the Daily Mail as saying: ‘We were not ashamed of him. After he came out of hospital we encouraged him to come here so that everyone could see what a triumph it was for him to ...”

“... nothing but political functionaries whose votes reflect the will of the party. So we end up with Mike Pence as vice president; under the old system, it could well have been Hillary Clinton, which certainly would have made for a livelier relationship with the president. Meanwhile, Jefferson, who resented Burr’s attempt to steal the presidency, excluded him ...”

“... Some of his nominations are conventional enough. His choice for national security adviser, Mike Waltz, is a Floridian soldier who wouldn’t have been out of place in George W. Bush’s team. Waltz has spent much of the last few years raging about the withdrawal of US forces from Afghanistan, which he believes will lead to ‘al-Qaida 3.0’. On Russia ...”

“... albums, Frida dipping a toe into adult-oriented rock with Phil Collins, while Agnetha worked with Mike Chapman, producer and songwriter for the Sweet and Suzi Quatro. ‘The general feeling at the time was that Abba was really uncool,’ Björn told Gradvall. ‘If you’re predisposed to low self-esteem, like I am, it was hard not to think, “Okay, that’s ...”

“... cage of a steel sculpture of 1967 and to either side whitish paintings by Robert Ryman and Agnes Martin. No self-respecting museum would present a combination which was so insouciant art-historically, but it does look very good. The second room is Gallery 12 nearby, diagonally traversed by Dan Flavin’s 1968 piece, knee high and fifty-odd feet long, coolly ...”

“... didn’t make it onto the stage until Monday morning; most of the crowd had already left. With Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy assassinated, Nixon in the White House, the Salt I treaty still a few years off and nearly half a million troops in Vietnam, three of those memorable turns were in ‘protest’ mode: Havens’s sampling of the 19th-century ...”

“... rose so high that each share was split into ten, to draw in more buyers. In March 1995, chairman Martin Edwards sold 1.2 million shares, and pocketed £1.5 million. In 1996, after the second Sky deal, shares rose again to £4.50 each; Edwards sold £3.7 million shares, making £16.6 million. Peter Reid, the ex-Everton midfielder and manager – and as ...”