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“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... it was convenient for the tailors.’And the war? The knowledge that the Nazis were just a few miles away, across the Channel? How did that impinge on their daily life?‘We felt safe here. We were all just 20, and at that age it didn’t bother us. We went to business as usual. To tell you the truth, we didn’t really think about it.’Mrs Levine ...”

“... of any decent publicist, this time van Middelaar places at the head of his book an epigraph from Miles Davis. It reads: ‘I’ll play it first and tell you what it is later.’ The politics of the EU in a one-liner.But the price for these moments of frankness has risen. Along with acknowledgment of the ‘coercive consensus’ of the Council ...”

“... this wealth, Leland Stanford founded Stanford University in 1885 on the site of his horse ranch 35 miles south of the city, and it was from Stanford’s loins that Silicon Valley sprang.In 1959, the Buddhist priest Shunryu Suzuki was dispatched to San Francisco’s Japantown to serve the local Japanese American community. Young white people who had read or ...”

“... from cranky freelancer to feted urban guru (‘the Mother Theresa of urbanism’, as Mike Davis, a rare dissenter from the church of St Jane, once put it) came about through her encounter with the slum, as a concept and, less and less over time, as a reality. It was the slum, in the eyes of the planners of Radiant Garden City Beautiful, that made ...”

“... lacked the ‘grandeur’ to be a Gandhian. He took up strange causes, such as the case of Garry Davis, an American former war pilot who tore up his US passport at the Palais de Chaillot, the UN’s temporary headquarters in Paris, and proclaimed himself a ‘world citizen’.Camus’s​ break with Sartre and Beauvoir wouldn’t become official until the ...”

“... him back. Jean Himes broke down when she read the book, and was found weeping in the desert, a few miles from a ranch in the Sierra Nevada that they were renting. She wasn’t the only one who couldn’t stand it. As Himes remembered, ‘the left hated it, the right hated it, Jews hated it, blacks hated it.’ His closest literary friends weren’t much more ...”