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“... skull-hugging mask last seen on 1970s wrestlers. And again in all-over polka-dot fur, in black-and-white clown face, head like a cracked Alien egg with waxy black rivulets running from the crown. The one exquisitely wearable thing he made was for a Blitz magazine feature in 1986: a Levi’s denim jacket covered with a haze of golden hairpins.In the same ...”

“... the paper, then under the nominal direction of a senile manager and an infant editor. Parnell, Michael Davitt and the Land League were accused of having inspired agrarian outrages including murder, arson, horse-gelding and cattle-houghing. Certainly they had developed ostracism as a weapon, causing it to be christened the ‘Boycott’ after the landlord ...”

“... so that his head seems quite small and (appropriately) apple-like. We buy a luminous blue and white Victorian tile at Gabor Cossa which one of the partners thinks is William de Morgan but isn’t and then cross the road to the Fitzwilliam. I take in a chance selection of pictures, dictated by which happen to be in range of available banquettes, and in ...”

“... already there. James Wood coined the term ‘hysterical realism’ to describe her first novel, White Teeth, but it only really applied to what was most on display – the foisonning, punning, teasing, literary surface. The surface changed for each of Smith’s novels, but the underlying message, about compassion, warmth, strength, forgiveness, the ...”

“... moment’ when Cecil Rhodes’s name was given to another African territory, and Rhodesia became a white settlers’ country – almost Smithia. Such aggrandisement was deplored by men like Rex Niven in the Colonial Service of West Africa: their purpose was to help create an independent African nation out of the Colony and Protectorate of Nigeria – and it ...”

“... in the form of a script. Warner’s magic realism is not that of Marquez and Rushdie but of Michael Ondaatje, whose magical images do not require any supernatural explanation. Morvern’s knee sparkles with different-coloured specks because she once slid on her knees and grazed her skin across the glitter of a Christmas card. Lanna’s grandmother ...”

“... US side. How could Blair not be part of this? Having hung in through thick and thin, guiding the White House towards the UN, helping to secure a Security Council resolution which arguably does just enough to square international law with the demands of US military power, the Prime Minister could not possibly walk away now, on the verge of the tactical ...”

“... to mount a programme of public works unmatched since Roosevelt’s New Deal. This attracted enough white working-class votes in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin to win the electoral college (though not the popular vote). Many of these Rust Belt voters had supported Obama in 2012, not necessarily because they agreed with his liberal social policies, but ...”

“... father (second from left, referred to throughout as ‘Father’), his grandfather Szlomo, the white-bearded patriarch of the family who spoke only Yiddish, and his cousin Leon, the editor of a Polish-language Jewish newspaper. At the back stand the only woman, his aunt Helena Loterman, who looked after her father, Szlomo, and her husband, both of whom ...”

“... to bridge gaps, between urban workers and suburban professionals, between rich and poor, between white and black and Latino. By his willingness to change and to transcend the standard political categories, Tye’s Kennedy could have become America’s ‘high priest of reconciliation’. The seventh of the nine children of Joseph and Rose Kennedy, he grew up ...”

“... of​ the great paradoxes of the Obama era is that it encouraged so many liberals, both black and white, to see the black experience in America not as a slow, arduous struggle for freedom culminating in the election of a black president – Obama’s version, not surprisingly – but as an unending nightmare. Not least among the reasons was that a black man ...”

“... Studio Vingt-Huit – high up a winding street of Montmartre, in the full blasphemy of a freezing Sunday; taxis arriving, friends greeting each other, an excitable afternoon audience’. The description is Cyril Connolly’s, the occasion a showing of Luis Buñuel’s first film, Un Chien andalou. The audience seemed baffled at the end, and some of its members were angry, unprepared no doubt for what Connolly called the ‘destructive reverence’ of the film ...”

“... laid the groundwork: at the time, academics at Michigan were doing important work in anthropology (Michael Taussig and Marshall Sahlins), political science (Archie Singham) and African American studies (Harold Cruse). Robinson’s wife and intellectual partner, Elizabeth, began graduate studies in anthropology there, while Robinson joined the politics ...”

“... City is billed as ‘Russia v. The Rest of the World’. In the middle of the party, dressed in a white suit with wide lapels, matching shirt and handkerchief in his breast pocket, his large hands covered in rings, was an elderly man carrying a Louis Vuitton briefcase. At every opportunity he glanced at his reflection in a mirror, fixing up the curl in the ...”