“... 18th-century slave ship looked back to the colonial and commercial origins of racial tensions in North America. With its description of a multicultural utopian settlement established in Florida by the survivors from among the ship’s cargo and mutinous crew, Sacred Hunger also tentatively explored how things might have begun to turn out differently. In ...”

“... known as Teddy Boys. The riots were the inspiration for Oswald Mosley to run as a candidate for North Kensington in the 1959 general election, and he spoke during the campaign about the repatriation of the West Indians living in Notting Hill. He lost his deposit. Jacob Rees-Mogg isn’t a fascist, and Mosley liked the European idea – so long as it was ...”

“... wall paintings featuring miracles from the life of Christ. No other cycle of its kind survives north of the Alps. Hatto also wrote a life of St Verena of Zurzach, an Egyptian woman who accompanied the Theban legion to Europe in the third century and became famous in the Swiss canton of Aargau for the care she gave to girls and lepers. She is often ...”

“... fact, in many cases (‘often the opposite’), been lavishly rewarded. There exists in the City a North Korean-sounding entity called the Approved Persons Regime, which is supposed to monitor and establish standards for senior bankers, but which has instead ‘created a largely illusory impression of regulatory control over individuals, while meaningful ...”

“... of Trump in 2016. The new secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, and the national security adviser, John Bolton, are believers in US force projection whose appetite for wars can only frustrate Trump’s announced purpose to withdraw from the wars we are already in. The extent to which this president understands so basic a fact about a government he nominally ...”

“... du Pont, son of an adviser to Louis XVI, began manufacturing gunpowder on the Brandywine River, north of Wilmington. His firm became the largest supplier of explosives to the Union during the Civil War and it now ranks fourth among US corporations as a generator of air pollution. Among its innovations are nylon, Teflon, Mylar, Tyvek and Kevlar. It made the ...”

“... London – to which superstar American CEOs were lured with the promise of an audience with Elton John and the king in St Paul’s Cathedral (proof, apparently, that Britain is ‘open for business’, or more plausibly that desperate times call for desperate measures) – Starmer switched to a clumsier metaphor. ‘We are in the business of building on our ...”

“... paying the highest price in the loss of the lives of our young soldiers – almost alone. I’m John Kerry and I approved this message. In a world of instant projections and medium-is-the-message contemplations, commentary on the presidential race of 2004 might finish right there: Kerry’s style is downbeat, America-blaming, slightly depressing, while the ...”

“... her speeches were greeted with jeers and she was called a ‘stupid cow’ by Tony Marlow, one of John Major’s Maastricht rebels (there’s a video of this on YouTube: Marlow looks very pleased with himself, especially when he manages to repeat the remark after the Speaker, Betty Boothroyd, asks him whether he’d used ‘unparliamentary language’). When ...”

“... as they are, can’t help not coming up to. The second or critical section is extremely strong: John Gross on the Oxford Book, George Hartley on the early publishing, Clive James on the jazz criticism as well as the poems, Alan Brownjohn on the novels, Christopher Ricks on Larkin’s poetic style and structure, Seamus Heaney on his idealism, and others. But ...”

“... England’s Greatest River (1907), Ackroyd discovers in this 214-mile journey, from Cotswolds to North Sea, a mirror for national identity. The river is a constant in history and the river is history, of a persuasion that reminds me of childhood favourites such as Henrietta Marshall’s Our Island Story, originally published in 1905 and glossed as ‘A ...”

“... hemisphere), with hard-to-quantify consequences like the disruption, or even disappearance, of the North Atlantic Carrier which brings Caribbean warmth via the Gulf Stream, and its cold counter-current returning from Norway with spawning eels. There are, on the face of it, three alternatives: the exhaustion of fossil fuel (14 million years’ accumulation of ...”

“... to do with it, probably, escape always attractive to my mother, particularly an escape from the North – or the dark, satanic mills aspect of it anyway.It is this, I think, that makes her very occasionally urge on me the attractions of the writer’s life, instancing the novels of Leo Walmsley or Naomi Jacob – even, going up the scale a bit, the Brontë ...”

“... him. They ‘utilised the social, economic and religious grievances to be found in the disaffected North, grievances linked not to feudal or popular uproar, but to the increasing distrust felt by the regional gentry towards a threatening and revolutionary court policy’. Ideology was as unimportant as it always has been for Elton. And he leaves us with the ...”

“... or rather a proof that paradise exists and can be abandoned. Goethe is happy with the sterner North, or says he is. ‘The Duchess is well and contented,’ he writes of his employer’s mother’s homecoming from her Italian trip, ‘as one is when one returns from paradise. I am now used to it, and this time I was quite happy to leave Italy.’ Used to ...”