“... the Visigoth held Rome to ransom in 408 ad, he demanded, on top of gold, not silk but 3000 lbs of black pepper.Even if most of the East-West trade never went near the supposed route of the Seidenstrasse, the volume of it was still huge. Calculations based on one of those invaluable scraps of papyrus from the rubbish dump at Oxyrhynchus suggest that customs ...”

“... unprecedentedly ‘vicious’ criminal sentences for those convicted, especially when they were black youth. And so, too, with the police, and the courts, and schools and churches and social services, as explored in Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State, and Law and Order (1978), written in collaboration with Chas Critcher, Tony Jefferson, John Clarke and ...”

“... assert. For example, in his splendid 1991 study, The Crisis Years: Kennedy and Khrushchev 1960-63, Michael Beschloss demonstrated that Kennedy had been privately relieved by the building of the Berlin Wall, had publicly almost refrained from commenting on it, and had waited until two years after it was safely built before using it as a sound-stage for his Ich ...”

“... remarkable one, in which Powell pays tribute to the ‘insight’ and ‘courage’ of his fellow Black Country MP John Stonehouse, soon to become postmaster general and then regarded as a coming man in the Labour Party, perhaps even a future leader. Stonehouse had denounced as ‘a canker’ the campaign by local Sikh bus conductors to be allowed to wear ...”

“... awake, in a dream’ over a vibrating shroud of organ drone. A.R. Kane – uniquely, a Black duo in the indiesphere – coined ‘dreampop’ to describe their oblique, lunar-crusted grooves, born from a home studio and inspired by LSD and lucid dreaming.Dreaming was far from unexplored territory in pop music: ‘Daydream Believer’, ‘Sweet ...”

“... transparent, had arrived at a point where most of their activity was secret and mysterious. Enter Michael Lewis. Flash Boys is a number of things, one of the most important being an exposition of exactly what is going on in the stock market; it’s a one-stop shop for an explanation of high-frequency trading (hereafter, HFT). The book reads like a ...”

“... as long as possible on strict rations. One manual instructed doctors to begin with a diet of black coffee and whiskey, to ‘keep the patient more comfortable while he is being starved’. Calibrated starvation did seem to extend some patients’ lives, but it was uniformly awful and few could adhere to the regimen.Faced with this horror, the pancreas ...”

“... In 1995 Michael Howard, the Tory Home Secretary, dismissed Derek Lewis from his post as Director General of the Prison Service and appointed David Ramsbotham Chief Inspector of Prisons. Lewis then wrote a book about his experience – Hidden Agendas: Politics, Law and Disorder (1997) – which reflects very badly on Howard ...”

“... of the kings of France, trade routes to Islam, routes of Viking invasions – thus, so, black and white, and not otherwise. What lies behind it all? History of this kind maximises one’s information, minimises doubt. Its authors are pressed into shorthand statements, which often invite one tacitly to assume that things have not changed very much ...”

“... god lives, Gather on willow-ground The blood that was shed, moon-coolness; All roads flow into black decay. Under the golden boughs of the night and stars Sister’s shadow sways through the silent grove, To greet the spirits of the heroes, the bleeding heads; And softly the dark pipes of autumn sound in the reeds. O prouder sorrow! You brazen altars, The ...”

“... the ratification of the Kyoto Protocol, made the ecoterrorist a pop cultural staple. The nadir was Michael Crichton’s novel State of Fear (2004), in which a group of eco-extremists fake climate disasters for political ends. Crichton appended various denialist tracts to the text, though its paranoid reading of climate politics was a few years ahead of the ...”

“... called the Violet Quill had formed, and its members – Christopher Cox, Robert Ferro, Michael Grumley, Andrew Holleran, Felice Picano, Edmund White and George Whitmore, together with the film critic Vito Russo and the editor and academic George Stambolian – began producing books whose examination of gay life, though often programmatic, was still ...”

“... Dr Faustus is a morality play or a parody of one, whether The Massacre at Paris is a tragedy or a black comedy, seems to derive from Marlowe’s own uncertainty about which side his bread was ultimately buttered, a social double-agent’s desire to keep his options open. Such preferment as Marlowe did receive was as a more literal kind of ...”

“... its legacy: ‘The flu resculpted human populations more radically than anything since the Black Death,’ she writes. ‘It influenced the course of the First World War and, arguably, contributed to the second. It pushed India closer to independence, South Africa closer to apartheid, and Switzerland to the brink of civil war. It ushered in universal ...”

“... outside my window on purpose to freak me out’ – this, it transpired, was the silhouette of two black streetlights, one superimposed on the other. I spent two weeks adding 143 words to my novel, about peeing next to Rob Roy’s grave, feeling further from coherence with every draft. Local news graphics of the virion floated through the air, along with ...”