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“... Will Rogers died in 1935 the most loved man in America. Ray Robinson, who was 14 years old, remembers the news reaching his summer camp by radio and spreading like wildfire from bungalow to bungalow. No death since Abraham Lincoln’s (the kidnapping and killing of the Lindbergh child aside) had moved the country so much ...”

“... strong and heroic because they have to be mediated through the horrors of the present. Sugar Ray Robinson (1982) and Jack Johnson (1982) and the figures in King Zulu are half-formed, mutilated, scratched out to become negatives. Basquiat typically composed his figures from pure black pigment and added contours and features in white. For him, the ...”

“... can never forget the excitement in my mind after seeing it,’ Akira Kurosawa said about Satyajit Ray’s first film, Pather Panchali (The Song of the Little Road), and it’s true: this movie, made for next to nothing, mostly with untrained actors, by a director who was learning (and making up) the rules as he went along, is a work of such lyrical and ...”

“... Locke and Gary Player at Wentworth in 1956, Terry Downes getting the better of an ageing Sugar Ray Robinson in 1962 (after the fight, he sportingly remarked, ‘I didn’t beat Sugar Ray, I beat his ghost’), Slip Anchor winning the 1985 Derby by seven lengths, most of the Arsenal Invincibles season of 2003-4. But ...”

“... the new novel’s protagonist is less interested in social justice than in his own expedience. Ray Carney owns a furniture store on 125th Street in Harlem, has a college degree and, at the age of 29, aspires more than anything to move his family to a better neighbourhood. It’s a slippery climb up into the higher echelons of Harlem’s business elite, not ...”

“... of Control (and the opportunity to meet, and be photographed with. Jack ‘Kid’ Berg, Sugar Ray Robinson, Mike Tyson etc). The Choker that forced Read to leave the Yard came at the conclusion of the triumphant Kray enquiry. The men upstairs refused permission for the celebratory tie for which Read had designed the prototype. ‘The double initials ...”

“... contemporaries – who included James Baldwin, Paddy Chayefsky, Richard Avedon and Sugar Ray Robinson – the only one to make an impression on him was a classmate who used an easy flow of patter to sell his fellow students subscriptions to the New York Times.At seventeen he found a job at Timely Comics, which later became Marvel, through a ...”

“... According to Gordon Ray, writing in 1956, all that posterity could reasonably expect to know about the elusive Wilkie Collins was his name and dates of birth and death. This has proved to be an exaggeration. Thanks to Kenneth Robinson (whose revised Wilkie Collins, A Biography came out in 1974) and now, preeminently, to William Clarke, we now know much more – especially about Collins’s family affairs, or scandals, as they would have seemed to his contemporaries ...”

“... thousand people would attend, but in the event a hundred thousand came to hear bands including X-Ray Spex, the Clash and Steel Pulse. It all kicked off with a march from Trafalgar Square through the East End to Victoria Park, led by giant papier-mâché models of Adolf Hitler and the National Front’s Martin Webster. The route passed Brick Lane, scene of ...”

“... Edwina Currie. At the time of the Wessex computer scandal, he said, Mrs Currie’s husband Ray and his brother Brian were senior executives at Arthur Andersen. Mrs Currie was incensed by this reference, and complained of misuse of Parliamentary privilege. When I asked her whether the Secretary of State had given a misleading reply very much to the ...”

“... and joined a group called Pat T. Cake and His Mighty Panthers. Soul music was coming into its own. Ray Charles was recording for Atlantic Records; Sam Cooke had left the Soul Stirrers; James Brown was touring with his Famous Flames. But Otis Redding wasn’t a soul singer yet. Billed as Otis ‘Rockin’ Redding or ‘Rockhouse Redding’, he sang rock and ...”

“... Red Butler, who reported it as having been said by Randolph Turpin after his defeat by Sugar Ray Robinson. How my old lady came to know this is a mystery, and how Tom comes to know it, too, as I’m sure boxing isn’t his thing. 22 January. I’m reading George Steiner’s My Unwritten Books, a series of chapters, some more autobiographical than ...”

“... of anthocyanins (the red and blue colouring matters of flowers) under the brilliant Professor Robinson, a professorial Fellow of Magdalen, where he was treated with undisguised contempt by his fellow Fellow C.S. Lewis, who regarded Robinson as a typical scientist and an object of almost automatic censure. Todd himself ...”

“... lesser Thackeray’ – Trollope. He refines an argument originally put forward by Gordon Ray: that Thackeray’s great project in fiction was to ‘redefine’ the gentlemanly ideal for a middle-class Victorian ethos. Historically, Gilmour sees the Victorian preoccupation with gentlemanliness (and its derivative, ‘manliness’) as signalling the ...”

“... and periodically subject to extreme physical abuse, the Marlowe of the novels, unlike Edward G. Robinson’s insurance investigator in Double Indemnity, is trapped in the dark underside of American life and never acquires the insurance man’s protective armour, his forceful, single-minded menace. But whereas in Woman in the Window Lang directed ...”