“... of the letter-opener handle protruding from his chest appears in this volume of the papers.) John Lewis, aspiring divinity student from the backwoods of Alabama – subsequently head of SNCC and now a Congressman from Georgia – makes his first appearance in King’s world. And Ezell Blair Jr, a high-school youth from Greensboro, North Carolina writes to ...”

“... Harvard law school professor Archibald Cox. It was picked up in 1978 by the conservative Justice Lewis F. Powell in the Supreme Court’s first plenary encounter with affirmative action in Regents of the University of California v. Bakke. Powell, in a pivotal decision, embraced the diversity rationale while rejecting all other justifications for racial ...”

“... in writers: the jacket copy says, ‘He has written biographies of Katherine Mansfield, Wyndham Lewis, Ernest Hemingway, Robert Lowell and his circle, D.H. Lawrence, Joseph Conrad, Edgar Allan Poe, Scott Fitzgerald and Edmund Wilson,’ adding that he is now writing a life of Humphrey Bogart. Popular biographies written ...”

“... fuel economy and the safety of drinking water. Trump’s first choice as administrator of the EPA, Scott Pruitt, soon after taking command, purged its website entry on climate change. (More than a year later, if you go to epa.gov/climatechange you are told the page is still being ‘being updated’ to ‘reflect EPA’s priorities under the leadership of ...”

“... took us through the work of Berthold Brecht, while the nationalist head of English pitched us into Lewis Grassic Gibbon, and it didn’t seem as though they were pulling in opposite directions (as James Leslie Mitchell, his real name, Gibbon was, after all, a socialist internationalist). For the rebellious, rebellion was still an individual, not a corporate ...”

“... or did she have to stay in the state judicial system? One of the revelations in Bob Woodward and Scott Armstrong’s exposé of the court, The Brethren (1979), was that the justices had initially agreed to hear Roe v. Wade without a full bench (two justices had recently retired) because they hadn’t realised what was at stake. Once they did, they scheduled ...”

“... level-headed than the fantasies woven around the Kellogg-Briand Pact of 1928 by Oona Hathaway and Scott Shapiro in The Internationalists (2017), which traces the blessings of today’s ruled-based order to the schemes of assorted US bankers and Wall Street lawyers for universal peace in the same years, in a ne plus ultra of empty American ...”

“... and Sidmouth. There were fellow poets such as Felicia Hemans, Tom Moore, Samuel Rogers, Sir Walter Scott and Robert Southey; artists of various kinds including the gifted amateur Sir George Beaumont, Francis Chantry, John Constable, Thomas Lawrence, James Northcote and John Soane; and from the theatre, Jack Bannister, George Colman the younger, various ...”

“... American societies in his copious ‘Ethnographic Notebooks’. The work of the anthropologist Lewis Henry Morgan, a persona non grata in contemporary Indigenous Studies, made Marx appreciate the Haudenosaunee’s ‘sense of independence’ and ‘personal dignity’, the diminishment of which Marx and Morgan lamented as a product of mankind’s ...”

“... on the US Amazon bestseller list, but the true-life Donald J. Trump story has more to do with what Scott Fitzgerald called ‘foul dust’ than with ideas or ideology. Reckoning with Trump means descending into the place that made him. What he represents, above all, is the triumph of an underworld of predators, hustlers, mobsters, clubhouse politicians and ...”

“... his admiration for the ‘luminous brutal prose, blocked-in with a painter’s eye’ of Wyndham Lewis’s Tarr, Powell identified self-pity and sentimentality as besetting weaknesses of romanticism – traits he detected in many well-regarded writers: Wilde, Ford, Greene, West, even Joyce. How did he square this dislike with his admiration for Proust? He ...”

“... were sailing regularly from the Clyde to Oban and Fort William and the islands of Mull, Skye, Lewis and Staffa, where Fingal’s Cave had been attracting visitors by sailing boat since the mid-18th century: the list included Joseph Banks, Samuel Johnson and John Keats. Mendelssohn was an early visitor by steamboat (‘He is on better terms with the sea as ...”

“... Powell was a teenager when the First World War ended, and a student as The Waste Land, Ulysses and Scott Moncrieff’s translation of A la recherche detonated in its aftermath. The combination of moral caesura and literary revolution marked a divide that Proust, though he would contribute to it, had never known. ‘This “age-gap” of the 1920s was a chasm ...”

“... offensive in the desert war; in the Anglican All Saints’ Cathedral, designed by Adrian Gilbert Scott; the British Embassy with its immaculate lawn sloping down to the edge of the Nile; the Turf Club, an all-male establishment lifted straight from Pall Mall.And there was the Gezira Sporting Club, a vast pleasure ground occupying the southern half of ...”