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“... He picked as a running mate buttoned-up patriarchy, the lean, crop-haired, perpetually tense Mike Pence, who actually has experience in government, signing eight anti-abortion bills in his four years as governor of Indiana, and going after Planned Parenthood the way Trump went after hapless beauty queens. The Republican platform was, as usual, keen to ...”

“... the March on Washington, the Watts uprising and Vietnam, the moon landing and the assassination of Martin Luther King; whose inspiration for Xenogenesis, her great biopolitical trilogy of the 1980s, was both the then recent revelation that scientists had stolen cancer cells from Henrietta Lacks’s body without her family’s knowledge, and Ronald Reagan’s ...”

“... ambition itself. An entire generation sniggered as fatuous Mr Robinson took the graduate aside, in Mike Nichols’s film, and whispered the one-word secret to success: ‘Plastics.’ However, Americans turned cynical in response to something much deeper than cultural style or youthful anomie. In 1954, the Supreme Court declared racial segregation ...”

“... of statues reduced to pigeon roosts. In the middle of a voter registration drive in Atlanta, Martin Luther King Sr allowed the Ebenezer Baptist Church choir, dressed as house slaves, to sing for a ball celebrating the 1939 première of Gone with the Wind. His ten-year-old son was dressed as a pickaninny. King was criticised by his fellow Baptist ...”

“... nation’s first ever ‘stand your ground’ gun law (the legislation that gave us the Trayvon Martin killing and countless other instances of unpunished citizen bloodletting); and prolonging the life of the severely brain-damaged Terri Schiavo in a cynical bid to burnish his culture wars résumé. Also disgraceful was the disenfranchisement of Florida’s ...”

“... Keith have always been favoured by impersonators – from the 1970s TV fixtures Freddie Starr and Mike Yarwood ‘doing a Jagger’ to Stella Street and Pirates of the Caribbean – in a way the Beatles never were, perhaps because it always felt as if they were an indivisible four-headed entity. The sign outside the pub at the end of my road (which, before ...”

“... a whole took notice in 1959 when a black journalist, Louis Lomax, and a white television reporter, Mike Wallace, produced a five-part series on the Nation of Islam for New York City’s Channel 13, The Hate that Hate Produced. Nothing that hadn’t been said a hundred times before was included in the film clips of the Messenger, Malcolm and a fiery young ...”

“... on a chair made to look like an inverted, near-naked black woman, an image published on Martin Luther King Day. Abramovich, with his dislike of unnecessary publicity, was not amused. In the Branson household, it’s the man himself who can be relied on to do this sort of thing. The photo on the back of Bower’s book shows Branson sitting on the ...”

“... seek button – derangingly – every two or three seconds. Burbly soft rock, stale oldies, Dean Martin singing Christmas carols, Mexican polka music, endless mirthless ads for Petco and Wal-Mart – the full auditory wasteland of American popular culture assailed us. Shades of when we used to be girlfriends. We bickered most of the rest of the way. By the ...”

“... Waterstone’s gala dinner. The first speaker is Henry Cooper. He says something relevant, apropos Mike Tyson: ‘when someone goes arahnd bitin’ people’s ears off and punchin’ refs, that only tells me one fing: ‘e doesn’t want to be in the ring.’ Precisely. Cooper’s other good remark, about the desperately low quality of opponents for Audley ...”

“... so thick it blocks out almost all the light below,’ says another diver. An AP photograph by Dave Martin shows one of the gentle little waves of the Gulf Coast in close-up, a wave on Orange Beach that’s brownish gold with spots of orange and black oil on it, water acting just like water and looking just like paint thinner or gasoline.And then there’s the ...”

“... 953168 5Food Policy: Integrating Health, Environment and Society by Tim Lang, David Barling and Martin Caraher.Oxford, 320 pp., £32.95, March 2009, 978 0 19 856788 2The Memoirs of the Rt Hon the Earl of Woolton.Cassell, 452 pp., 1959Eating: What We Eat and Why It Matters by Peter Singer and Jim Mason.Arrow, 400 pp., £7.99, September 2006, 978 0 09 ...”

“... sound system dodgy, so I end up relaying my thoughts about the queen and her reading into a hand mike, which since I’m reading from the text is a bit of a juggle whenever I turn the page. Afterwards there’s a signing, which ends just in time to catch the London train. The station is only a few hundred yards away but on the other side of a vast building ...”

“... leader, and faced stiff opposition from South African mercenaries introduced by Colonel ‘Mad Mike’ Hoare. When political support from outside was withdrawn at the end of 1965, Che returned to Dar-es-Salaam, wrote up his diaries, and flew to a Cuban safe house in Prague to consider his next move. His ambition, as ever, was fixed on Argentina. The Cubans ...”

“... Stone Money’, published in 1991. There’s a particularly good retelling of the story by Felix Martin in his 2013 book Money: The Unauthorised Biography. Yap has no metal. There’s nothing to make into coins. What the Yapese do instead is sail 250 miles to an island called Palau, where there’s a particular kind of limestone not available on their home ...”