“... yourself to your public in character and at your very best. As with his heroes James Brown and Miles Davis, it’s hard to picture Prince outside a certain rigorously maintained ‘look’. But in Garcia’s anecdote Prince’s touchiness about image feels less like showbiz corn and something closer to undiagnosed pathology. You have the impression of ...”

“... what little flesh remained. A few metres away a warthog lay rotting, and beyond that a camel. For miles outside the village – and outside every village I passed through in Somaliland, the self-proclaimed but unrecognised state that comprises the northern part of Somalia – thousands of sheep and goats lay strewn in varying states of decay. The contents of ...”

“... in an epic struggle for the enemy’s capital. A century and a half later one can still see the miles of ramparts at Petersburg and Richmond; the crater blasted by Union miners in an attempt to breach Confederate defences is still there. Casualties of this final battle were more than 60,000. Jackson was right about the destructiveness. Whole libraries have ...”

“... an enviable joie de vivre. When my husband and I first moved to the University of California at Davis in the early Sixties, we were dazzled to find that our colleagues owned stock in the Napa Valley vineyards, and drove out on the weekends to look at their grapes. In the ascetic East at the time, a penchant for anything more lowbrow than The Seventh Seal ...”

“... were wearing a tuxedo, you would have a grand piano.’ From ‘Fear’: ‘I am jet fuel and six miles long. I am bad business. I make the rooms grow smaller.’ If lyric poems compose a kind of substitute body, then Siken, as he negotiates his disability, needs the alternative bodies shaped by poems as much as anyone can.The book gives special attention to ...”

“... show off the scars of major surgery. The towpath was his lifeline as he upped his daily quota of miles, returning to health and strength and Pickett’s Lock. Within the fugitive stretches of the Lea Valley, from which the travellers who used to dive for scrap metal have been expelled, along with a number of camps of economic migrants and rough sleepers, our ...”

“... artists don’t have the opposite tendency. Some, like the contemporary San Francisco artist Jimmy Miles, incline to a dry, coolly minimalist practice, in which white space is not only tolerated, but an essential, if seriously off-kilter aesthetic feature in its own right: I’m not sure what to call Miles’s austere and ...”

“... a tall façade and an anonymous rear. The Sydney site, a peninsula overlooked on all sides across miles of blue water, or by a nearby high-rise city, ruled out this camouflage. All but one of the contestants began with the most obvious difficulty: how to squeeze two opera houses onto a site barely 250 feet wide by 350 feet deep, with deep water on three ...”

“... turn’ in an essay published in Social History in 1992, a tempest ensued. Jon Lawrence and Miles Taylor, two of Stedman Jones’s recent PhD students, insisted that Mayfield and Thorne had entirely misunderstood their mentor’s work, which they felt should be judged not in terms of its theoretical affiliations but according to an empiricist ...”

“... Martin trace the origins, rise and decline of a mostly misunderstood political movement. Angela Davis, who was an ally of the Panthers and a member of the Communist Party, complains that she is better remembered as a 1970s fashion icon, known for her large Afro, than for the depth of her political commitment: It is both humiliating and humbling to discover ...”

“... extreme length of Castro’s speeches is a puzzle. He compulsively worked them over. Angela Davis remembers him telling her that he used to get nervous before delivering them. Part of it may have been to do with the methodical patience he learned during his two years in the mountain fastness of the Sierra Maestra. It was also the place where Castro, who ...”

“... being top dogs, and top dogs they were until the battle of Ain Jalut (the Spring of Goliath) a few miles north of Jerusalem, in 1260. Keegan gives a lot of attention to this battle, which not many people have heard of, not even Sir John Creasy, author of Fifteen Decisive Battles of the World. Hulagu, grandson of Genghiz, who ruled the southern half of a ...”

“... music and journalism in which Shaw moved. Weintraub is not as immaculate an editor as Rupert Hart-Davis, nor his match as a stylist (in one footnote he refers to Shaw’s ‘massive disinterest in Scottish music’), but he comes close to rivalling Hart-Davis’s superb annotation of Oscar Wilde’s letters, tracking down ...”

“... that might mean – or by tearing down statues of Robert E. Lee across the South. The 2400 miles of Route 66, America’s most famous highway, pass through only one state in the former Confederacy, Texas. Yet in 1936 the first edition of the Negro Motorist Green Book identified half of the 89 counties along the route as ‘sundown towns’, where ...”

“... by a Thai Communist hit squad in Bangkok later that year. How much​ did the British know? John Davis, the Force 136 man who was closest to Chin Peng, Lai Tek’s successor as MCP leader, had been in the prewar Special Branch. He knew the secret of Mr Wright, but did not tell his comrade. Anyway, the end of the war brought a new situation. In Indochina and ...”