“... legally, on state capitols with loaded shotguns. The NRA has taken to honouring the birthday of Martin Luther King because, before he became America’s most famous proponent of non-violence, he had once been denied a gun permit in Alabama, and so, according to NRA logic, was actually a ‘victim of gun control’ when he was killed years later by a bullet ...”

“... secretary of state for education, England had 203 academies. Most of them were developed under Andrew Adonis’s academies programme for New Labour: the Richard Rogers-designed Mossbourne Community Academy in Hackney, which opened in 2004, is one of these, as is Zaha Hadid’s Evelyn Grace Academy in Brixton. The programme was launched in 2000 by the then ...”

“... one of his sons put it, ‘he might win’. The 2017 manifesto was written by his head of policy, Andrew Fisher, who hoped that people would read it ‘and say: “Fuck, yeah, I’m voting Labour.”’ It set out big policies, including public ownership of the railways and Royal Mail, banning zero hours contracts, and higher income tax for those on more than ...”

“... overheard him say on the phone.‘You’re diving through the pampas grass looking for excuses, Martin – just send the book back!’‘Seamus, I’m very grateful to you for your excellent poem in aid of my auld acquaintance Hugh MacDiarmid. But there’s a mistake in it.’‘Jesus Christ, Cockburn! There’s a hole in the page. That’s right. A hole ...”

“... No Name in the Street in 1972, a book haunted by the murders of Medgar Evers, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Baldwin had lost all hope in white Americans, the ‘sickest and certainly the most dangerous people, of any colour, to be found in the world today’.Baldwin’s anger was understandable: the backlash was in full swing, led by Nixon in the ...”

“... of conspiracist discourse is never lost for words or answers. It is mimicked by foot soldiers like Martin, whom I met in Trafalgar Square. Like Dominic, Martin didn’t match the cliché of conspiracy theorists as unkempt eccentrics, hippies, stoners, ragged and unbarbered and decked with badges. He was a graphic designer ...”

“... Dempster to settle old scores, which didn’t stop her being indignant when Diana told all to Andrew Morton. During her first holiday on Mustique, Colin Tennant, who had just bought the island, asked whether as a wedding present she would like a piece of jewellery or a piece of land. She responded without hesitation: ‘a piece of land’. Thinking the ...”

“... 1824, when the party system was temporarily in disarray. John Quincy Adams, who had come second to Andrew Jackson in both the popular and electoral votes, struck a deal with Henry Clay, who came fourth, giving Adams a majority of the House votes. Adams then named Clay his secretary of state. What Jackson’s supporters called the ‘corrupt bargain’ was ...”

“... broader Labour movement’. As late as the 1960s this could produce, as in Sheffield, a Labour MP (Martin Flannery) married to a Communist wife, and a young engineer (Richard Caborn) who, doubtless under the patronage of his CP father and predecessor, began as a shop-stewards’ convenor at Firth Brown Tools at the age of 24, then modulated into a Kinnockite ...”

“... consultant) and Dr Michael Clark (a Parliamentary adviser). Southern Water enjoys the services of Andrew Bowden as its Parliamentary consultant. Southern Electricity expressed its appreciation of Ian Bruce by making him a gift of two fax machines. British Telecom uses Simon Coombs as its Parliamentary consultant, Midlands Electricity has ...”

“... threat to British democracy, a more serious one than terrorism, either external or internal. As Andrew Haldane, director of stability at the Bank of England, put it in a historical overview a few years ago, ‘there is one key difference between the situation today and that in the Middle Ages. Then, the biggest risk to the banks was from the ...”

“... enfranchisement for black people in the United States has produced many martyrs: Medgar Evers and Martin Luther King; James Chaney, Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman. And now Heather Heyer, the 32-year-old paralegal killed in Emancipation Park. It is true, as some have sanctimoniously pointed out, that even in her ...”

“... Chibas was demolished by Prio Socarras, the labour minister of the outgoing President Grau San Martin. During the years between Moncada and Batista’s fall he rarely seems to have been drawn into a discussion, and never into a vote. Castro’s will-to-power, a pre-Freudian phrase that keeps suggesting itself when one reads about him, combined with the ...”

“... Larkin elegies have the authentic plangency of E.J. Thribb. The best, as yet uncollected, is by Andrew Motion, and was first published in the TLS. ‘This is your subject speaking’ is a long poem, with a powerful and complex narrative drive. In the final section, Motion visits Larkin in the nursing-home where he was dying of his cancer:The door to your ...”

“... funds for the defence of the Scottsboro boys, and when she died, in 1967, her estate went to Martin Luther King and, after his death, to the NAACP.Crowther admires the fact that, in the midst of all this, Parker repeatedly ‘dissected her own privilege’. ‘Soldiers of the Republic’, for example, begins with the narrator welling up at the sight of a ...”