“... or messengers. Ellison’s dream was of a different kind. His friends included the black novelist Richard Wright and critics like Kenneth Burke and Stanley Edgar Hyman; his heroes were Joyce and Eliot; he studied The Golden Bough for the mythical themes he hoped would make his novel immortal. Ellison aspired mightily and he dressed the part as he imagined ...”

“... that came before him. And BBC managers are unsackable. In the recent judgment on the Cliff Richard case, besides criticising the rationale behind broadcasting the story in the first place (which, typically enough, was in part to avoid criticism for not broadcasting it), the judge found that the UK news editor was not a reliable witness and that the ...”

“... naval base, black servicemen revolted when white soldiers celebrated the death of Martin Luther King by raising the Confederate flag. The US military leadership fumblingly tried to accommodate the growing number of Black Power activists in Vietnam – military bureaucrats started investigating commanders who did not allow black troops to wear Afros and ...”

“... funding to Ark’s schools. In 2012, when his proposal to send a leatherbound copy of the King James Bible to every state school in the UK was nixed by David Cameron on grounds of cost, Marshall was among those who stepped in to foot the £370,000 bill. The following year, Gove appointed him lead non-executive director in the Department of ...”

“... with regret, and never gives up the hope of reform, but nowhere does he write as if he agreed with Richard Price, the hero of his father’s generation, about the perfectibility of social man through sheer enlightenment. Rather, he speaks of Price and Joseph Fawcett and others with a tender veneration, as great and good men, perhaps too good for the world. The ...”

“... I thought I was too grand to do interviews, but then I was asked to interview Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton on the set of some film. So I said, what the hell, I’ll do it. That initited the interviewing period of my life: I remember coming back and thinking. ‘It’s an absolute doddle, interviewing’ – I mean. Elizabeth Taylor was more famous than ...”

“... in clogs and woollen skirt’ who took up arms and walked out fearlessly to confront her king and restore him to his throne. One of the many verses goes: Fiers enfants de la Lorraine Des montagnes à la plaine, Sur nous, plane ombre sereine, Jeanne d’Arc, vierge souveraine! Marjorie Annan Bryce in a Suffragette procession to mark George V’s ...”

“... it’s clear that Fanon was aware, in 1957, of how Abane had died – lured to a meeting with the king of Morocco, stopped on the road by his FLN rivals, strangled to death. When Fanon’s newspaper, months later, pictured Abane as ‘dead on the field of honour’ – when it declared that he had been wounded in a firefight with the French, and had fought ...”

“... interest, studiously examining the backgrounds of Ceasar and Cleopatra, Saint Joan, and In Good King Charles’s Golden Days, and extending the discussion to many other plays. He looks for the roots of Shaw’s thinking about history in Carlyle, Macaulay, Nietzsche, Buckle, Marx and others, including John Stuart Stuart-Glennie, a philosopher of history ...”

“... it might be funniest if gangsters did have just these conversations, and why shouldn’t they? Richard Nixon and his aides turned out to talk exactly like the President Philip Roth had invented in Our Gang. Tarantino wrote Natural Born Killers after True Romance and before Reservoir Dogs. He says he hasn’t seen the Oliver Stone movie, and while we may ...”

“... master-class in doing politics the LBJ way. He wanted another of his mentors, the Georgia senator Richard Russell, to serve as his eyes and ears on the committee. Russell refused: he was too old, he said, and ill (he had emphysema); in fact he hated the idea of working under Earl Warren, the Republican chief justice and a man he despised. So Johnson got to ...”

“... of developments – political turbulence within the House of Saud, centring on the succession of King Fahd; insurgent Wahhabism in the kingdom (with a direct line to the 11 September attacks); signs of a Saudi-Iranian rapprochement; the new assertiveness of other OPEC powers; the dismal findings of the Simmons Report, spelling out the declining yields of ...”

“... colony. We have a programme and a list of guests. Jeremy Treglown is there, but where are Richard Gere and Bernardo Bertolucci? Where is Kurt Vonnegut? The bus sizzles along wet roads flanked by blackened chunks of Kendal Mint Cake and we debuss at the tiny Peredelkino church, where a service for Pasternak is to be held. The choir has not yet arrived ...”

“... Watford, a stop on the trail that begins with the selfie queue by J.K. Rowling’s Platform 9¾ at King’s Cross Station, just over the way from St Pancras, where the trains from St Albans pull in to Central London. The big producers and stars fly in for a shoot at the Warner Brothers studio next to the Harry Potter set, but they don’t stay long. Painted on ...”

“... at least until Peaky Blinders came along? In my experience, nobody, not even Oswald Mosley or Richard Nixon, was capable of radiating such unease in company. Harold Macmillan couldn’t stand having Powell opposite him in cabinet looking ‘like Savonarola eyeing one of the more disreputable popes’. So he relocated Enoch way down the table where he ...”