“... the worst; and he is now rather stronger than before. This became very clear last October, when Warren Christopher, the former US Secretary of State, categorically ruled out any possibility of oil sanctions. ‘There is no appetite for that,’ he said on the first leg of his five-nation African tour, even as he professed himself ‘troubled by the conduct ...”

“... belated reaction to mass killings in Bosnia, where she worked in the early 1990s as a young freelance reporter. She was understandably appalled by what happened after the carnage began in 1992: ‘Despite unprecedented public outcry about foreign brutality, for the next three and a half years the United States, Europe and the United Nations stood ...”

“... any other racial configuration of killer and killed did not prove that in the particular case of Warren McCleskey, one of four black men convicted of killing a white police officer during a robbery, the defendant suffered his fate because of his race. In principle, the new Georgia criteria for distinguishing capital murder from other kinds and for deciding ...”

“... detox and drug rehabilitation projects. The London Connection, in Westminster, tries to attract young people between 16 and 26; it has television, a pool table, provides free razors and lunch at 15 pence. The Kaleidoscope Project, in Kingston upon Thames, aims to serve heroin-users in need of treatment. They house a medical team who run a methadone ...”

“... under-the-flyover-Portobello-Road colony that belongs on the South Coast – in Hastings or the warren of junk-peddling back streets around the station in Brighton. The warning signs never change: cards in newsagents’ windows advertising Tarot readings and patchouli-oil massage leavened with a rash of charity shops and a plague of cheap books. Here are ...”

“... I was raised by a river. ‘Thick’ is a good word for the way water seemed to me when I was young and still seems now: sustaining, brown, benign – or white, decisive, invigorating, rushing over a weir, churning from the back of a boat. Having been adopted, I was spared the binding notion of blood, with all its passion and fatalism. I simply took the ...”

“... gangrenous leg: the result of undiagnosed diabetes. Aurelia moved Sylvia and her younger brother, Warren, to Wellesley, Massachusetts, so that her parents could help while she went out to work. At 13, Plath wrote to her mother from summer camp nearly every day. Always prone to losing weight, she reassured Aurelia by listing everything she ate (‘Two bowls of ...”

“... are rarely diapers for the babies and toddlers who have been taken from their parents. Some are as young as five months. In one camp, five hundred children are confined in a windowless warehouse. In others, they are encaged behind chain-link fences. In some camps, there are no hot meals. There are outbreaks of chickenpox, flu, measles, scabies and mumps, and ...”

“... had come about, not through vile Occidental cunning, but by chance. When the Governor, Sir Mark Young, emerged from a Japanese prison camp in 1945, he brought out a plan to empower Hong Kong to run some of its own affairs, on a basis of one ratepayer (literate in English or Chinese), one vote, as part of the leisurely run-up to self-rule that was normal in ...”