While travelling up the US-Mexican border several years ago, I met an anti-immigration campaigner in Columbus, New Mexico who went by the name of Quasimodo and who had carried a .38 pistol around with him ever since he went into an abandoned house and found some Latinos there.

Shortly before the last presidential election, Columbia political science professor, Fred Harris, bemoaned in an essay: “Were Harold Cruse, the author of the unsparing 1967 book The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual, still alive, he would despair at the state of black intellectual life.”

Last September, Scotland held a referendum on independence.

On 26 November 2007 Brandon Moore, an unarmed 16-year-old, was shot in the back while running away from a security guard in Detroit. The guard made it look like sport. “[He] put one arm on top of the other arm and started aiming at us,” Brandon’s brother John Henry, who was with him at the time, told me.