“... might come up with. It would also have to be able to bomb targets on the ground five hundred miles away from base – an impressive range, for a fighter – and operate from the deck of a heaving warship at night and, if push really came to shove, hover and land like a helicopter. The last mass-produced fighter jet that did that, the British-designed ...”

“... his enterprises wins out over hard feelings. ‘Every day was an excitement,’ the animator Marc Davis is quoted as saying in both biographies. ‘Whatever we were doing had never been done before. It was such a great thrill to go in there . . . Everybody here was studying constantly . . . It wasn’t that you had to do these things – you wanted to do ...”

“... the crystal wine glasses, the Chateaubriand being carved in front of us at five hundred miles an hour felt extraordinary, a swank unreality that matched my elevated mood. I was 32. I was going to Hollywood. I was making a movie. I was going to be a screenwriter.I thought about Dad up there among the clouds and hoped he was looking down. He could ...”

“... Ronald Sukenick and Paul West, as well as their heirs, such as T. Coraghessan Boyle, Lydia Davis, Rick Moody, William Vollmann and David Foster Wallace. None of these writers – however popular or influential, however frequently their writing appeared in the Paris Review or Conjunctions or the year-end Best American and Pushcart anthologies ...”

“... Clark. The company decided to shift its headquarters from Guildford to Somerset (about a hundred miles) and Aikens had to move house. Almost as soon as he moved, his company started predicting losses. It seemed that the new craze for ‘alco-pops’ had done terrible damage to the cider market, and the brilliant Mr Aikens had not spotted the danger. All this ...”

“... was born on or around 8 May 1911, in a two-room shack outside Hazelhurst, Mississippi, forty miles south-east of the Delta. (The Mississippi Delta is not the delta of the Mississippi River, but part of a gigantic alluvial plain created by the Mississippi’s annual flooding.) His biological father, Noah, worked in a sawmill on the Mangold plantation. His ...”

“... Junction, the reconnected station twinning us with Croydon. No longer is the innocence of G. Davis affirmed in large white letters. George is certainly not OK. The obituaries are in for a life of bad timing: he was caught at the wheel of a getaway van outside the Bank of Cyprus on the Seven Sisters Road in Holloway, 16 months after his release by the ...”

“... was the embodiment of the revolutionary democracy we had not yet learned how to imagine,’ Angela Davis observed. ‘My people need inspiration,’ Simone said. In the spectacle she made of herself as well as in her voice – ‘I want people to know who I am,’ she said – Simone became a race champion. In the mid-1960s Vernon Jordan, the head of the Urban ...”

“... service to establish Black units, while continuing the policy of segregation. Colonel Benjamin O. Davis, the highest ranking Black man in the army, was soon promoted to brigadier general (he remained the only African American general for the rest of the war). These changes led to a rise in Black enlistment. But Black draftees were often sent to training camps ...”

“... of Blackheath (where Wat Tyler assembled insurgents for the Peasants’ Revolt in 1381). A few miles south and west are Dulwich Woods, Sydenham Woods and Dulwich Park, ‘leafy’ areas in a part of London that could be otherwise defined by less sylvan spots: Walworth, Woolwich, New Cross.Both these books are almost wholly about housing, with a handful of ...”

“... by the conversion.) Barack went to a mission school run by Seventh-Day Adventists, walking three miles but, unlike his classmates, wearing shoes. His father told him: ‘I want you to go beyond where I am.’ On returning home each day, the boy was required to recite sums to his father while standing by the dinner table. If he was slightly less than ...”

“... admitted to Fulbourn mental hospital, a leafy and surprisingly pleasant institution three or four miles outside Cambridge. I don’t remember very much about the week or so that led up to this point, but I was told later that I had been hallucinating for several days, and I still recall images and fragments from what may well have been a meaningful though ...”

“... Church Enstone, where her father was vicar for much of the 1960s. The vicarage is within five miles of what became Cameron’s constituency home when he was MP for Witney and is roughly the same distance from what is now Soho Farmhouse, a members’ club, a little piece of the metropolis that is a haven for the Chipping Norton set. Both May’s maternal ...”

“... by Clinton as she races round the globe, visiting 112 countries and logging nearly a million miles (as she repeatedly tells us). Energised by ‘a bias for action’, she pursues a frenetic agenda: promoting international economic agreements that will allow nations to ‘play by the rules’ on ‘a level playing field’, ‘creating jobs and exciting ...”

“... Dave van Ronk (the folk singer lightly fictionalised in the Coen Brothers’ film Inside Llewyn Davis). It’s a haunting song, and it came back to haunt him in the summer of 1964 when he heard it on his car radio in the moody R&B reworking by the Animals. ‘I nearly jumped out of my seat,’ he later said. By convention this was the Damascene moment that ...”