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“... be allowed to own guns.) John Rice was one of the few local black religious leaders not to join Martin Luther King’s marches, for which his daughter offers a few explanations: he thought the Children’s Crusade put children at risk, and he was anxious that his church might be firebombed and if it were, the ...”

“... much the same and more from the many masterly works on Jesus and Judaism by Geza Vermes, or from Martin Goodman’s thrillingly epic overview of the same period, Rome and Jerusalem: The Clash of Ancient Civilisations. Aslan writes clearly and sensibly, though he is overfond of snappy two-word punchlines as narrative punctuation, and his publisher has forced ...”

“... no ice. The two straits are part of the Northwest Passage, the so-called ‘Arctic Grail’. From Martin Frobisher in 1576 to John Franklin in 1845, generations of European explorers searched for a navigable route through the Arctic islands to Asia. Many of them – including Franklin and his men – died in the attempt. Their greatest challenge was ...”

“... Running); disenfranchisement during the capitalist takeovers of the 1970s and 1980s (Jitney, King Hedley II); and troubled assimilation into the mainstream in the 1990s (Radio Golf).Taken collectively, the plays dispute America’s myth of itself as a redeemer nation. The white immigrants who arrived on its shores left their past for a better ...”

“... everyone with boisterous condescension,’ Chester Himes remembered. ‘It was obvious he was the king thereabouts.’His place on the throne was shakier than he imagined. The novels he wrote in Paris, where he would spend the rest of his life, failed to deliver on the promise of Native Son, the incendiary tale of a poor black chauffeur in Chicago, Bigger ...”

“... the company. But ‘Mrs K says defunutely: Nyet.’ The dance critics Arnold Haskell and John Martin denounced his ‘tragic’ mistake, his lamentable disloyalty. An article appeared in Izvestia under the name of Serge Lifar, the same Lifar who had awarded Nureyev the Nijinsky Prize: ‘He has become a star by sheer virtue of the fact that he is a ...”

“... plans for a permanent memorial for himself: a thanksgiving for having become the least likely king of England since William in 1066. Henry placed his tomb in Westminster Abbey, served by the most elaborate chantry chapel in English history, but this was only the centrepiece of a series of arrangements involving a consortium of the greatest Benedictine ...”

“... a pedestal frequently end up toppling into the mud. Assassination tends to preserve reputations (Martin Luther King, Chico Mendes). Elected office can put the seal on a career or soil it for ever: for every Nelson Mandela, there is an Aung San Suu Kyi. Greta Thunberg at 16 is one thing, but it is hard to picture her going ...”

“... fighters would have to overcome the temptations of primordial revenge, and develop what Martin Luther King, citing Reinhold Niebuhr, called a ‘spiritual discipline against resentment’. In line with this commitment, Fanon’s vision of decolonisation embraced not only colonised Muslims, freeing themselves from ...”

“... and Warburg, one of Britain’s best-known general trade publishers. The firm was begun in 1910 by Martin Secker, and rescued from bankruptcy in 1936 when Frederic Warburg joined as a partner. Warbarg went on to build an outstanding list and was independent to the point of being a trade maverick. (It was Secker and Warburg who took on Animal Farm after ...”

“... back to the religion of their youth. Kselman describes, for example, the climactic moment in Roger Martin du Gard’s 1913 novel Jean Barois. Freethinking apostle of science and reason, Barois finds himself reciting a desperate Hail Mary when his horse-drawn carriage collides with two Parisian street-cars. Uninjured but morally shaken by his retreat into ...”

“... cultured English cardinal in exile, Reginald Pole, who had a better claim than Henry VIII to be king of England, became a – not uncritical – admirer of the ambiguous Spaniard. In the 1530s, it looked as if Valdesianism might shape the future of the Western Latin Church. That it did not was largely thanks to the institution that is the main focus of ...”

“... were at a loss. I had never been anywhere that felt so solid and so empty. The band’s producer, Martin Hannett, drew on Joy Division’s centrifugal tendency and pushed the band’s music into arrangements that were broken down, unproductive and full of disused space. It was the sound of their city but it could have been describing the entire country. The ...”

“... having suffered a stroke, died in bed at his rectory; and where, half a century later, Pope Martin V had his bones exhumed, burned, and the ashes thrown into the River Swift. Leicestershire folklore maintained that on the spot where one of the bones being carried to the fire fell, a spring of pure water spontaneously emerged, and became known as St ...”

“... an hour or less for City workers, not to mention Essex men and girls. After monarchs, ranging from King John, whose hunting lodge was at Writtle, to Henry VIII, who built New Hall at Boreham (still standing), came Elizabethan lord chancellors (one is buried at Saffron Walden, another at Felsted) and Georgian lord mayors and City luminaries (too many to ...”