“... circumstances’. The failure to address the health needs of detainees, Arnold concluded, is a major problem and detention itself is ‘frequently damaging to the health of detainees’. ‘The system of medical care at Yarl’s Wood and in those other detention centres we have visited,’ he said, ‘is incompetent, dishonest and brutal.’ In May ...”

“... the age’, as Neely puts it, ‘was that “race” mattered’; ‘racial beliefs’ were a ‘major determinant’ of behaviour in the era of the Civil War. We therefore need to recalibrate our assessment of the violence between white protagonists so as to open our eyes to the far darker realities of ethnic division. And furthermore – though he ...”

“... and bathrooms, a small dormitory for servants, a safe and a ‘radio capable of receiving all the major European stations’. It was exhibited at the 1925 Salon de l’auto in Paris, where it drew discriminating attention. The vehicle was called a roulotte, a fact which must have delighted its owner, fascinated as he was by chance recombinations of language ...”

“... In 1993 John McGahern wrote an essay called ‘The Church and Its Spire’, in which he considered his own relationship to the Catholic Church. He made no mention of the fact that he had, in the mid-1960s, been fired from his job as a teacher on the instructions of the Catholic archbishop of Dublin because he had written a novel banned by the Irish Censorship Board (The Dark), and because he had been married in a register office ...”

“... and teachers. Not since the publication of the central texts of the modern history of slavery, John Hope Franklin’s From Slavery to Freedom in 1947 and Kenneth Stampp’s The Peculiar Institution in 1956, has any serious history book claimed that slavery was a benign paternalistic institution. No one has argued that it was anything other than the great ...”

“... hard in other senses too: resistant, tough-minded, impartial and impassive.Probably before the major novels, though the work is undatable, Austen wrote an excellent unromantic story. ‘Lady Susan’ is the epistolary account, at novella length, of a charming and rather brilliant (though bad) woman’s amatory adventures in stuffy aristocratic ...”

“... rather Buñuelesque) by Duff C. and Lady W. being so middle-aged and ultra respectable. John Julius Norwich puts his father’s sexual success down to his ability to write bad sonnets to his lady-friends but one wonders if it was a more basic attraction. The moustache is hardly a plus, the photograph on the book jacket making him look like a 1940s ...”

“... Among the critics of Obama’s policies towards the auto industry is the Democratic Representative John Dingell of Michigan, the longest serving member of the House, and a long-time ally of General Motors, Ford and Chrysler. ‘I’m troubled by the different treatment of auto companies … and the treatment of those good-hearted people such as AIG and all ...”

“... of repression in which men like Elliott Abrams (now Deputy NSA and special assistant to Bush) and John Negroponte (now National Intelligence director) connived during the 1980s in Central America. The brazen persecution of Sahrawis is once again common, after a three-year interval of relative calm, following Hassan II’s death. In 2001, Mohamed Daddach, a ...”

“... have led Hizbullah to retreat to the Litani river. As the US national security spokesman John Kirby pointed out, the proposal ‘wasn’t just drawn up in a vacuum. It was done after careful consultation, not only with the countries that signed onto it, but Israel itself.’ Instead, as he has done repeatedly in the Gaza negotiations, Netanyahu ...”

“... of internal diversity and flexibility. In small societies a single dynamic personality can have a major impact, and this is demonstrated repeatedly in the History. Perhaps this is Ox ford’s historic secret, for even in periods of low intellectual respectability like the first half of the 18th century, when places such as Trinity College, Dublin, Edinburgh ...”

“... Species of 1859 (it is not clear how early Hardy read this, though he always claimed Darwin as a major influence), Mill, Comte, Marcus Aurelius. A pattern of self-education, ravenous and stringent, had begun. In London for five years from 1862, Hardy attended French classes at King’s College, and went daily for a time to the National Gallery to study a ...”

“... to the public at large. Impatience with the old ways had spread far beyond the media. Sir John Hunt, a former cabinet secretary, broke cover as early as election day 1983 to voice the discontents of the mandarins:In the absence in our system of a chief executive with his own supporting staff, a ‘hole in the centre’ of government was perceived ...”

“... forth to London and Edinburgh, intrigued by what looked to be but was not a reliable offer from John Stuart Mill of a position at the new London Review, Carlyle and Jane moved into the house in Cheyne Row where they would live for the rest of their lives. They began to find their way into literary society almost at once. Emerson had already sought out ...”

“... of the usual morose adolescent parables and things like that. The first issue had a foreword by John Wain, the novelist, who had just appeared then and was very famous. I wrote to him to ask if there was some message he could send to youthful aspirants and he did. It was rather good, about half a page, which ended: ‘and, if all this fails, back to the ...”