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“... making a patronising show of it, and stayed to tell a good story about Christopher Hill and John Sparrow, and of how he’d been the unwitting agent of a quarrel between them, while ignoring an ambitious and possessive American professor who kept yelling ‘Eye-zay-ah! Eye-zay-ah!’ from across the room. (‘Yes,’ he murmured at the conclusion of the ...”

“... punishment in the United States subsists – inescapably – in a miasma of race. The Honorable John H. Land in 1977 presided over the trial of a black man called William Brooks, whose case McFeely follows. Land is the son of a prominent local dignitary who had seen to the lynching of an adolescent boy 65 years earlier. The barefoot ‘little black ...”

“... and upset at not being able to find him. He spent the rest of the afternoon fretting about this guy. It wasn’t just that he had lost, but that he was risking so much money for such trivial rewards. Back then punters had to pay a 10 per cent levy on all bets, either when they placed them or as a deduction from their winnings, so there was an extra gamble ...”

“... for the one-man show which this actor was performing, but it was not ordinary, he said. The guy was like no one else. MacGowran didn’t want to go on, Robert Armstrong said. And Robert’s job was to make him go on. Before the show, with all his make-up in place and his costume, he waited in an upstairs bedroom in the Funges’ house above the ...”

“... scene. And irritated by it. And then one or two things happened: a very good story came in from a guy called Jim Crace. He was just an unknown chap who came from Birmingham or somewhere. Another story came in unsolicited from someone called Ian McEwan. There did seem to be these gifted people out there, so we were up and running. People I knew about, like you ...”

“... the European Commission and other national governments were baffled by and suspicious of what John Sheail, in his history of British environmentalism, calls ‘the concept of making payments to farmers to farm below the maximum’. There were mutterings that it was illegal. But the commission came round, and Europe took up the concept. For the first ...”

“... in the county were killed for want of fodder. By the end of winter in this period, according to John Higgs’s The Land (1964), every blade of grass had been eaten and the animals were forced to follow the plough looking for upturned roots.The social structure of the country had changed, the population had grown, the plough had been improved, the threshing ...”

“... we in a Catholic church?’ She had once stabbed a priest to death in a film involving John Mills so knew about churches. ‘Yes,’ she said firmly. At which point a plumpish man in a cassock crossed the chancel in order to collect a book from a pew, bowing to the altar en route. ‘See that,’ said the interviewer. ‘The bowing? That’s part ...”

“... of learning he was to be taken to a detention centre: ‘I thought I was going home. And the guy at the desk said, not with these charges you aren’t.’In June 1989, Judge John Miller presided over a ‘waiver’ hearing to decide whether, given the seriousness of the charges, Gordon’s case should be transferred ...”

“... a block for loving their dogs,’ a former neighbour of Zainab’s said. ‘Like, there was this guy on the 15th floor, Steven Power, he had two bull terriers, you know those dogs? Loved them, he did. Would’ve died for those two dogs.’ People in the tower would go round to Steven’s for a drink. Sometimes they sat together outside the tower, too, next ...”