“... have enough money for food. The president promotes a $500 million project to paint the border wall black.Week​ Two: 10-16 May. The president is notable for avoiding the symbolic gestures American presidents usually make in times of crisis: expressions of sympathy, phone calls to bereaved families, visits to hospitals, ordering flags to be flown at half-mast ...”

“... away by Fortune. He soon grew restless there, too. He taught at Smith, SUNY-Stony Brook, Harvard, Black Mountain College, CUNY – yet none of them became a home. His New York apartment of longest tenure was a run-down sublet, to which he clung tenaciously. He moved in and out of the city. He lectured in Europe. He married four times. He never settled down at ...”

“... assumptions of their times. Sayers adds social and cultural snobbery to a conservative feminism; Michael Innes ties a display of interest in neoclassical art, literature and architecture to one in dreams, nightmare and the grotesque; Margery Allingham’s deep love of a semi-fictional and fast disappearing way of life in rural Suffolk and Essex is ...”

“... It was American scientists who went ballistic over Velikovsky, not historians, and one purpose of Michael Gordin’s probing and intelligent The Pseudoscience Wars is to ask why they responded to Velikovsky as they did. Putting that sort of question is a sign of changed times. Passions have cooled; circumstances have altered. Almost all previous books about ...”

“... Johnson, who ran a series of newspaper ads that portrayed the tax as an attack on ‘the entire black community’: Unlike most white Americans, many African Americans who accumulated wealth did so facing race discrimination in education, employment, access to capital, and equal access to government resources. In many cases, race discrimination was ...”

“... to the newspapers attacked the influx of Jews, others also came to their defence, most notably Michael Davitt, the leader of the Land League. ‘The Jews have never to my knowledge done any injury to Ireland,’ he wrote in a letter to the Freeman’s Journal in 1893. ‘Like our own race, they have endured a persecution the records of which will for ever ...”

“... coalition’, ‘citizens of nowhere’) has been flung about like confetti. Some characters (Michael Gove, Jeremy Hunt) have kept reappearing in different costumes; others (Gavin Williamson) played cameos which, in retrospect, seem scarcely real.One reason for this disorientation is the absence of any discernible economic or social progress, according ...”

“... Laski (Briggs’s favourite), R.H. Tawney, Denis Brogan, Eileen Power and her Cambridge husband, Michael Postan. Briggs began to read Marx and the new subject of sociology. He was drifting leftwards, remarking (after the Soviet Union had joined the Allies) that a talk on the USSR by the socialist barrister D.N. Pritt was ‘a very good antidote to rotten USA ...”

“... impulses of their enemies. ‘It’s no fun to protest on an empty stomach,’ said Mayor Michael Bloomberg to assembled journalists, ‘so you might want to try a restaurant. Or you might want to go shopping, maybe for another pair of sneakers for the march.’ New York is a Democrat city, but also a famous backdrop, and the Republicans took the ...”

“... about tax accountants. One, and the most obvious, is a novel about Irish dancers on tour with a Michael Flatley figure whose influence grows more sinister over time. Pounds of verbal oil will be poured into his perm; his bulge will almost rupture his trousers. His backstory – but surely you can picture it. One dancer is addicted to weed, another feels ...”

“... right of entry.Claudia Jones, the Trinidadian activist who founded Britain’s first major black newspaper, the West Indian Gazette, called the 1962 act a ‘colour-bar’ law which imposed ‘second-class citizenship … at a time when apartheid and racialism is under attack throughout the world’. The act wasn’t very effective: families were ...”

“... socialists and anarchists. The cops far outnumbered the protesters. A man with a megaphone and a black plastic boot on his head addressed the police: ‘They’ve got you dressed up like turtles.’ The turtles kettled the marchers to the east. I heard a libertarian carrying a Ron Paul sign discuss capitalism with a socialist. Could a pizza oven be owned by ...”

“... a mother (Lena) who has been to America, who might have had a different life there, and a father (Michael) who periodically folds himself into the arms of the monks to dry out. There is the convent where Edna was educated, and the eyebrows of the nun she loved passionately there. There is also the changeable shape of her first husband, whom she met while ...”

“... blood never having figured on the Bennett dining table even in its relatively refined form of black pudding. Some food we did consider too lowly to eat, tripe for instance, which was a favourite of my grandma, and chitterlings from the same ‘uggery-buggery pie shop’ down Tong Road in Wortley.Until I started to read the novels and diaries of the ...”

“... knows, the relief of that, the pub, the slope down into Newman Passage, the opening sequence of Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom, a puddle of bloody neon, awkward stone setts, smokers in doorways; and then out, immediately, into another world, Newman Street. Black leather, chrome, complimentary ...”