“... an unknown woman screaming next door, been kept for eight months in solitary confinement in a tiny steel cell with no natural light, witnessed the murder of two prisoners by US guards, and been constantly and repetitively questioned about fantastical crimes for which no evidence existed, Begg received a visit from ‘Martin’, of the Foreign Office. ‘Any ...”

“... Unionists as parochial know-nothings. Revisionist historians, most prominently Ian McBride and David Livingstone, have demonstrated that the history of Ulster Presbyterianism from the 18th century is characterised by intellectual richness, an openness to science, a commitment to progress and a taste for theological heterodoxy, notwithstanding backwoods ...”

“... realm of the airport showed up as an orange nimbus against the purple night sky. In the morning, David Cameron was holding an emergency press conference on the television stuck in the top left-hand corner of the breakfast room: ‘Work is at the heart of a responsible society,’ he politely hectored the assembled hacks, while we sloped off on our walking ...”

“... on Brunel’s Great Western Railway. Studies of Faraday’s experimental sophistication (by David Gooding) and his Sandemanian faith (by Geoffrey Cantor) have deepened, rather than challenged, our sense of his eminence. James’s work, meanwhile – in his own publications and his DNB entry on Faraday – has highlighted Faraday’s importance as a ...”

“... book will undoubtedly become the standard account of the Russian aspect of the Napoleonic wars. David Bell has recently argued that Napoleon introduced ‘total war’ to Europe. Following the 1789 Revolution, all male Frenchmen, on reaching a certain age, were called up as citizens to the armed forces. As a result of the levée en masse the French army ...”

“... built to accommodate cars. These spaces tend to be grey, the grey of unpainted cement, asphalt, steel and accumulated grime; and they tend to be either abandoned or frequented by people who are also discards, a kind of subterranean realm hauled to the surface. Or not. When the new Getty Museum opened off the stretch of the 405 freeway that connects Los ...”

“... a wider sense of possibility. ‘Booms in photography, Sunday film and theatre clubs, Surrealism, steel furniture, faintly obscure poetry’ were among the things Rose Macaulay singled out as characterising the ‘decorative, intelligent, extravagant’ 1920s. In 1919 the Women’s Engineering Society was founded and Nancy Astor became the first female MP to ...”

“... stay in London thirty years ago, there is an interesting exchange with the psychiatrist David Cooper. Sinclair: It seems to me that what has emerged from this Congress [the Dialectics of Liberation] is the necessity for what has been described as madness – as one of the few active means of keeping society alive ... Cooper: Yes, I think we’ve ...”

“... 1906 to Russian parents in Ukraine, he witnessed revolution, civil war and famine as a child. The steel town of Kamenskoye, where he spent his childhood, changed hands between Red and Whites several times. His family – skilled working class, not badly off, able to afford nice Sunday suits for the children – briefly retreated to Kursk, in Russia, where ...”

“... and in 1945 the party’s intention to take coal, gas, electricity, the railways, and iron and steel into public ownership was explicitly declared. Nationalisation continued to be a contentious issue throughout most of the period of the Attlee government. But its importance was rhetorically magnified by left and right alike. On the left, the illusion that ...”

“... Slessor’s good works on the Upper Niger still earn her an image on Scottish banknotes, while David Livingstone became the world’s best-known Scotsman. They did not save many souls. After 50 years’ work in India, the missions could show only 3359 converts. But their influence on empire was deep and paradoxical, at once the advance guard of colonialism ...”

“... get carried away beyond the merits of an originally sound case. Why, he goes on, do writers like David Pryce-Jones want the Parisians to have behaved like the people of Warsaw? It is certainly true that, as a result of their rising, the inhabitants of Warsaw managed to get their city largely razed to the ground. If Hitler had had his way, Paris would have ...”

“... during the Second World War Albanian campaign and describe soldiers, as Wilfred Owen or David Jones might, making their way to ‘the place where you don’t find weekdays or holidays, sick people or healthy people, poor or rich’. To possess a sunny disposition may be as much a handicap to a poet seeking approval in Britain as to come from a sunny ...”

“... successive ages, each of a thousand years, the first of gold, the second of silver, the third of steel, and the last of iron alloy. Each age represents a decline on the previous one, and the same is true of Hesiod’s sequence, which goes from gold, to silver, to bronze, to iron save that there is an unnamed fourth age, interspersed between the bronze and ...”

“... social problems. Like its friends in Tel Aviv, the Obama administration is worried that the Camp David treaty will be nullified if the Brothers gain the upper hand, and that Egypt will go the way of Iran in 1979, a fear exacerbated by the storming of the Israeli Embassy in September. But the Brothers denounced the attack on the embassy and have said they ...”