“... boss, the Mayor. This is to prevent the Police being used for political ends. Chief Daryl F. Gates rose through the ranks to the highest position in the LAPD. He is a moral absolutist who believes drug dealers should be shot, and who disowned his own son when he was convicted of drug possession. Gates is white, and is commonly suspected of being hostile to ...”

“... non-Arab population, bitter after long years of oppression at the hands of successive governments, rose up in 2003, they were confronted not only by government forces but also by government-backed militias led by men like Hemetti. Hundreds of thousands were killed.Hemetti’s story illustrates the complex allegiances that have dictated events in Darfur over ...”

“... were arrested and committed for trial. Thirteen were found guilty by the Basutoland High Court. In June 1949, after an appeal to the Privy Council, the chieftainess and her closest accomplice were hanged. ’Mamakhabane was the first woman and the first senior chief to be hanged for a medicine murder. Soon after, in August 1949, two of the highest chiefs in ...”

“... to any storey, and at each landing place there is a contrivance to let them in and out.’ In June 1853, Harper’s New Monthly Magazine reported the imminent introduction of steam-powered elevators into private homes in New York, by means of which an ‘indolent, or fatigued, or aristocratic person’ could reach the upper floors. Confusingly, there was ...”

“... So that, for example, I could write plays very quickly.’ He began to follow a routine: he rose early, worked, ate and rested at set times before going to bed at nine. Around this time, he estimated that he had enough material for forty plays. The prediction turned out to be remarkably accurate, even if the works to come were mostly not those he’d ...”

“... of Commons that there was ‘nothing novel’ in the bill, Alpheus Morton, MP for Sutherland, rose and snapped: ‘It upsets Magna Carta altogether.’ Finally, the proponents of the bill were reduced to denying that it created any precedent, to which Byles retorted: ‘Everything that this House does becomes a precedent of what it may do in the ...”

“... older, was standing by now on a plateau of distinction: beyond it, peaks in the distance, rose the writings of Locke and ‘Neuton’, the Englishmen Voltaire revered. Diderot had taken a step towards this level three years earlier when he published his breezily sceptical Philosophical Thoughts: ‘criminal opinions’, in the judgment of the Paris ...”

“... skills offer them the same possibilities? According to Chesterton, ‘twenty million young women rose to their feet and said: “We will not be dictated to,” and immediately became shorthand typists.’ But they had also found a skill that afforded them a better wage than factory work, improved conditions, and, if they were so inclined, the opportunity to ...”

“... was shot as he walked through the kitchen of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles. The date was 5 June 1968; and he had just won a narrow victory in the California Democratic primary. The gunman, Sirhan Sirhan, a Palestinian immigrant angry about Kennedy’s support for Israel, fired three shots at close range. Kennedy died the next day. For millions of ...”

“... once communists were in power in Beijing, ‘the stakes for its relationship with the Soviet Union rose dramatically, and with that came pressure and volatility – particularly for the Chinese Communist Party elite.’ (McGuire gives less attention to the perspective of those who propelled the breakdown: why did the relationship sour? Why was the crisis ...”

“... driven by the Vietnam War and by LA’s many defence companies, the unemployment rate in Watts rose sharply in the 1960s: by 1964 it was 30 per cent for men. Many employers, while officially against racial discrimination, refused to hire African Americans. Marooned in Watts, young men were regularly stopped and searched, and arrested if they ...”

“... when to exchange whispers for another round of drinks’. In the years that followed, as Hitler rose to power, Heinrich Mann was viewed by some as a significant figure from the left who was above politics, who, as late as 1932 in a letter to Thomas had emphasised his support for ‘a French-German federal state’, and had no time for German nationalism. In ...”

“... professional humiliation. In the 1999 production of Antony and Cleopatra at Stratford the curtain rose with Antony on his knees pleasuring the Egyptian queen of Frances de la Tour. Even the jaded eyebrows of Stratford went up a bit at this and just before it transferred to the Barbican Alan rang and began without preamble: ‘I’m sure you will be relieved ...”

“... which determined it, is quite well caught by two entries, one for 11 February 1965 and one for 17 June 1966: Once again we are taking the subsidiary role, the pro-American line, and Michael Stewart as our new Foreign Secretary is following it very faithfully indeed. And in all this Harold is deeply, personally committed ... He just saw that one must either ...”

“... he noticed a vocal score of a very recently published opera. As though drawn by a magnet, he rose and took the volume from the shelf, sat down at the piano, opened it, and began to play. It was the ‘Good Night’ scene from Benjamin Britten’s The Rape of Lucretia ... Ten years after Lenny’s visit to our home West Side Story excited the musical ...”