“... measures inflicted by the police, and not only below the Mason-Dixon line. Police killings of young black men, along with the mass incarceration of poor blacks in US prisons, have become the symbol of a national disgrace that is no more hidden than the concealed weapons that far too many Americans carry, and which is a symptom of the same faith in ...”

“... they looked like. She made things in plasticine – heads, flowers – and drew and painted from a young age. When she was 16 she enrolled at the Central School of Arts and Crafts, where she studied illustration and textile design and took life drawing classes with Bernard Meninsky, who was known for his heavy black charcoal lines (Cooke preferred a 3H ...”

“... nothing can be a real cool hand.’ He earns the respect of his fellow inmates (including a young Dennis Hopper and Harry Dean Stanton) in a boxing match against another prisoner, Dragline (George Kennedy), through his dogged willingness to offer up his body as a punchbag. It’s one of Newman’s best performances and was forced out of him by ...”

“... to change a plug or drive a car.His school-leaving prize, which he chose for himself, was G.M. Young’s Victorian England: Portrait of an Age. His turn towards history, and towards its Victorian legacy, was beginning. No other book made such an impact on him. ‘It was an inspired choice,’ Sisman writes, ‘for it was a work that Asa would refer to ...”

“... swastikas, medieval-looking wooden shields, torches and, of course, guns. They came to fight. One young woman in the counter-demonstration was murdered by a man who rammed his car into her, weaponising his vehicle just as jihadists have done in London and Nice and Barcelona. A helicopter surveilling the event crashed, killing the two officers inside. Dozens ...”

“... Boys and Dead Girls’ Mary Gordon identifies the ‘American innocent’. She tracks him – young, restless and bad news for women – through the novels of Faulkner, Dreiser and Updike. ‘All that matters is that his heart must be pure, and he must move forward to the quest which for so many male American writers is the most crucial one: the search ...”

“... them, look after the elderly, remember you are nothing, and keep the cheapskates at bay.When I was young, I had a thing for the after-places, which didn’t have patrons, or, heaven forfend, members, but habitués. There were a few Chinese restaurants in Gerrard Street which had shebeens in the back. You had to drink and not fight – these were the only rules ...”

“... about Netanyahu’s predecessors, they had their fascination, from the monastic self-discipline of David Ben-Gurion to the gluttony of Ariel Sharon. Netanyahu comes across as a hollow figure: a ‘marketing man’, in the words of Max Hastings, who met him while writing a biography of his brother Jonathan. Yet Netanyahu can hardly be avoided, or his survival ...”

“... them could doubt that the bombers were Syrians and Palestinians. The series, mainly written by David Leppard, who worked closely with the Scottish police team, ended with a scoop: white plastic residue found at Lockerbie was traced back to alarm clocks bought by the Dalkomini gang. There seemed no more room for argument. ‘The Sunday Times ...”

“... to put people right about other people is incorrigible, indeed obsessional. In his review of David Cecil’s biography of Max Beerbohm Malcolm Muggeridge allowed it to be a graceful job of work, but said it missed the real point about Beerbohm and his lifestyle, which was that he concealed his Jewish origins and was a crypto-homosexual. Of ...”

“... resisting and uncovering the culture of compulsive doping. The Russian Affair is an account of a young Russian couple – Yulia and Vitaly Stepanov – who helped expose a vast doping conspiracy. David Walsh, a sports journalist for the Times with a good record of uncovering cheats (he wrote about his role in exposing ...”

“... he worked at Warren’s Blacking Warehouse? What can we make of his extravagant mourning for his young sister-in-law, Mary Hogarth? How do we account for his abrupt and ruthless separation from his wife, Catherine Hogarth Dickens? What did or did not happen between him and the young actress Ellen Ternan during their secret ...”

“... murder earlier this year. How did we come to this? In Mania: A Short History of Bipolar Disorder, David Healy goes back to the Greeks and Romans in search of an explanation. There are good reasons for this. Very few people had heard of bipolar disorder before 1980, when it was introduced in the DSM-III – the diagnostic manual of the American Psychiatric ...”

“... in the Megastore who ‘samples’ his signs of identity from its offerings, but as a young journalist-critic who needs to report on it. In 1985 Si Newhouse, the mogul of the Condé Nast media empire (Vogue, GQ, Vanity Fair), purchased the New Yorker from its founding family – to scatter some of its aura on his other publications, or so it was ...”

“... to her, though she needs to move away from them if she is to defend them. Ben, the baby, is too young to feel a sense of emergency, but Viv, at three, is old enough both to co-operate and to do the opposite of what she’s told. Even when she follows instructions, success isn’t guaranteed. Asked to bring the bat from the closet – Molly means the ...”