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“... nor his friends readier for bold adventure on a Saturday free of school than all did in the ‘white town drowsing’ on the Missouri shore of the mighty Mississippi River where Mark Twain in the 1840s drank deeply of the sweetness of life, and never forgot it. ‘Free’ was a word of powerful attraction for Twain. His friend Tom Blankenship enjoyed a ...”

“... resulting trial of the pro-Darwin teacher John Scopes pitted the attorney Clarence Darrow against William Jennings Bryan, the ex-Populist and fervent evangelical. Bryan, who had been secretary of state in Woodrow Wilson’s first administration, was persuaded to take the stand as a witness for the truth of the Bible; Darrow delighted his captive audience of ...”

“... deaths in both countries, with ethnic minorities heavily overrepresented. Meanwhile, rage against white supremacism is exploding on American streets. Whatever the fate of these uprisings, the largest since the 1960s, a period of devastation lies ahead. Tens of millions of people are likely to lose their livelihoods and their dignity.As a general insurrection ...”

“... the era of the Civil War. We therefore need to recalibrate our assessment of the violence between white protagonists so as to open our eyes to the far darker realities of ethnic division. And furthermore – though he doesn’t quite say as much – he seems to think that by putting the Civil War in its proper place on the scale of destruction we can also ...”

“... translation of a book by the Danish archaeologist P.V. Glob, which was full of striking black and white images of their strange, patient faces – ‘Donatello-like’, Bernard O’Donoghue once said – the beauty of which Glob celebrated in what was in the English version slightly fruity prose: ‘Majesty and gentleness still stamp his features as they did ...”

“... Crowley, Hermann Hesse); they had been to obscure movies (Herostratus by Don Levy, Black God, White Devil by Glauber Rocha) and customised their TV intake with the ease of any digital-era couch potato. They also had conspicuous specialisms which anticipated the age of identity management and served them well in later life: they hung on, by and large, to ...”

“... independence in Mali. The chairman of the assembly ‘pointed with a cautious smile to the plaster-white figure of the French state symbol on the chamber wall above his ceremonial chair. “There is Marianne,” said he with another cautious smile but with an echo of laughter in his voice, “and here are we. She so ...”

“... idea of literature, and a peculiar division of labour between writer and reader. Their author, William Gaddis, who won the National Book Award with JR, might actually have felt short-changed by the accolade of the imprint, to judge by a riff in JR deploring the way ‘longer works of fiction [are] now dismissed as classics and … largely unread due to the ...”

“... was a hoax. None of Joan Didion’s books has been long, exactly, not with the generous amounts of white space she provides, which serve as fresh linen and air conditioning after a day’s driving in the desert, some respite from the perils. But air conditioning, being a human enterprise, can go on the blink. Then the motel room becomes a furnace, and sooner ...”

“... judge and the ultimate policeman. We have seen all these scenarios before. All the extreme white supremacists will take to the streets, I guess.’In the rush to recognise Trump’s new victim status, nobody seemed to be thinking about his own invocations of brutality. Before he was banned from Twitter, he had been warned for ‘glorifying ...”

“... of the jury’s power to determine its own verdict, free from the threat of punishment. But if William Penn were to preach at Gracechurch Street today, Mr Bushel and his fellows would be unable to afford him the protection of their special verdict, since the case – as a public order offence – would not come before a jury at all. The ink of the Criminal ...”

“... William Golding’s new novel, Fire Down Below is the third volume of a trilogy, the other parts being Rites of Passage and Close Quarters. The trilogy is about a voyage to Sydney in 1813, and a bald, merely literal account might run like this ... On the first page the hero appears, Edmund FitzHenry Talbot, an unformed young man of good family who is going out to help govern New South Wales in an aged line-of-battle ship, Captain Anderson commander, and who has been given a book in which to record his journey by his godfather, an influential peer ...”

“... first peacetime, non-departmental intelligence organisation’.Fleming delivered the report to William ‘Wild Bill’ Donovan, a much decorated First World War veteran who had been lobbying Roosevelt to establish an American spy agency separate from the Navy, War and State Departments. A month later Donovan submitted his ‘Memorandum of Establishment of ...”

“... he says of Byron; and of Dickinson, no less winningly: ‘She was reclusive, tended to wear white clothing, which was thought odd, and scarcely left her bedroom in her later years.’ Such things strike a whimsical note, but usually Carey’s humour has a flintier edge. It is, for example, difficult to miss the disdain in a description of Stephen ...”

“... and remained a champion.Purdy was born in Ohio in 1914, the second of three sons. His father, William, was a banker unwisely turned property developer. After William lost large sums of money, Purdy’s parents divorced, and his mother, Vera, began running a boarding house. Richard, his older brother, had a successful ...”