“... her as aggressive and confrontational. Her brother saw this as ‘casual racism’: when a young black woman was ‘emotional and upset’ this was interpreted as threatening behaviour.Ahmed’s death led the coroner to issue a prevention of future deaths notice to the DWP; so did Carré’s death. Recipients are legally obliged to act to prevent ...”

“... is around fifty years since I first saw a computer program. It was half-term and, too young to be left to my own devices, I was taken to the university where my father worked and allowed to play a computer game. This was the 1970s, barely twenty years after the creation of the first functioning programming languages. The game, Star Trek, was ...”

“... peasant who, having stumbled on political power, is unsure how to wield it. Reporting on Michael Portillo’s visit as defence minister to Slovenia, Romania, Bulgaria and Macedonia in 1996, Anne Applebaum (coincidentally, for the Evening Standard) has a good old chuckle: Up and down the red carpets he walks, Her Majesty’s aircraft just behind ...”

“... a yet higher level. Should we then be either surprised or morally self-assured at the photos of young men and women in uniform leering at or torturing naked prisoners in an overcrowded prison in Iraq? As more and more evidence comes out of similar episodes in Afghanistan, Guantanamo, Mosul, Basra and so on, it does begin to be clear that abusive ...”

“... the freakishly perverse bankers and investors, she behaves like Orwell in Wigan, like those nice young poets sent north to report back on the dining habits of the natives. To listen on buses and in pubs. Jack London became a disguised tourist in the lower depths for The People of the Abyss in 1902, but Knowles plays smart. She dresses correctly, making the ...”

“... if you can call it meeting when the other person is unconscious on a bench, and lost his mother young. Lionel brings him up, standing in loco parentis (assuming that emotional involvement is no part of what a parent does), offering a workable role model as long as the polarity of every term (‘Do something useful. Steal a car’; ‘Go home and watch some ...”

“... for his ‘angel’ paintings, in which he added feathery white wings to portraits of girls and young women. His influence in the early days of strategic camouflage derived from the fact that this New Hampshire conservationist, who admired Thoreau and revered the natural world as ‘God’s studio’, had developed a more scientific interest in plumage and ...”

“... chat to whomever was around or just people-watch. In this millennium, in cafés frequented by young white people, every customer seems to be silently staring at an Apple product, so that the places look and feel like offices. Even this phase may be on the way out. The next phase – of trying to keep customers from sticking around – has arrived. A food ...”

“... more than a week of protests. The activists decide to disperse, but a mural remains at the site: a young girl with a spade has just planted a sapling; she is holding a plant label with the XR logo, an hourglass in a circle. The piece, which has all the distinguishing features of a Banksy, borrows a line from Raoul Vaneigem’s The Revolution of Everyday Life ...”

“... would recycle and refine this recruitment strategy with the devshirme, the ‘harvest’ of young boys from Christian families in the Balkans and southern Russia, who would be taken to Istanbul, converted to Islam and trained for careers in the army (as Janissaries), the palace or the bureaucracy. The key principle was that the army should not be ...”

“... to the war, she praised Kautsky for still holding on to the ‘groping, searching, anxious’ young woman inside her – Kautsky was 53 at the time. When Kautsky visited Luxemburg in prison in May, her inner torment, her ‘restless, dissatisfied searching’ had been evident in her eyes (younger than the rest of her, Luxemburg insists, by 20 ...”

“... cannot imagine how the world of singers went on in the days when “Tara’s Halls”, and “The young May Moon”, and “The Meeting of the Waters”, were strains unborn.’ One of the clearest signs of how rapidly and how widely the song became popular is the inclusion of the Avoca Meeting on the tourist trail. The song and the place became popular ...”

“... Ford and Lewis, to the drowned worlds of J.G. Ballard and Will Self, the dystopian multiverses of Michael Moorcock and China Miéville. Fredric Jameson, considering postmodernism, talks about the ‘hysterical sublime’: a sort of Gothic rapture in contemplation of lastness, the voluntary abdication of power to superior aliens. This was heady stuff for my ...”

“... No lie, no British participation in the invasion. Oborne quotes Churchill’s reply in 1940 to a young rating on a battleship who asked him whether everything he told them was true: ‘Young man, I have told many lies for my country, and will tell many more.’ In wartime, and in sterling crises too, Oborne accepts that ...”

“... is melancholy to think that any village community should have rated the sacrifice of ardent young lives so low that it was held that their adequate commemoration was achieved by a cross of Cornish design and granite sold in various sizes by large department stores.’There was no English or imperial tradition of monumental memorials, no exemplars such ...”