“... that there were 3200 prisoners in Abu Ghraib, 700 more than its capacity. I heard Major General William Brandenburg, who oversees US military detention operations in Iraq, say: ‘We’ve got a normal capacity and a surge capacity. We’re operating at surge capacity.’ A year before, I had heard the President promise ‘to demolish the Abu Ghraib ...”

“... your coffee’. Anyone fortunate enough to be spared liquidation or internment in a concentration camp would become, ‘as so many already have, 20th-century slaves’. Hoover knew this sounded incredible, but ‘it took only 23 men to overthrow Russia,’ and he had it on good authority that, ‘after the actual seizure of power’, a revolution in the US ...”

“... Gallery tells me that Breakspears was once the childhood home of Elizabeth Stephen, the bride of William Hallett, who together constitute Gainsborough’s Morning Walk, and that Reynolds’s Captain Tarleton used to hang in the house. Captain Tarleton is one of the paintings (another being Millais’s Lorenzo and Isabella) which would figure in a dream ...”

“... to support a guild and School of Handicraft in the East End is recorded in Ashbee’s diary: ‘William Morris and a great deal of cold water ... he says it is useless, that I am going to do a thing with no basis to do it on ... “Look I am going to forge a weapon for you; and thus I too work with you in the overthrow of Society.” To which he ...”

“... and stewing; they are sweating all over; they are absolutely pining and dying for a Plot!’ So William Cobbett wrote to Henry ‘Orator’ Hunt in 1816. He did not exaggerate. The verb ‘foment’ might have been invented to describe the activities of Lords Sidmouth and Castlereagh and their spymasters in Bow Street during the turbulent 1810s. Seldom in ...”

“... who had suffered far more got proportionally much less. My colleague Paula Fass, the child of camp survivors, has written about discovering her ghost family, the families her mother and father lost before they met in a displaced persons’ camp in Germany and started anew. These were the families of which they would not ...”

“... and Protestants, further complicated by strife among different kinds of True Believer in each camp, provided the context for these wars. There was a 12-year truce between 1609 and 1621, even though battle continued at sea; war on land resumed between 1621 and 1648, and fighting at sea continued after that – but the Dutch Navy and its painters and ...”

“... What is peculiar to Górecki, and what appears to alarm the faint-hearted in the Modernist camp no less than the admirers of (say) Tavener or Arvo Pärt, is his spectacular independence from market considerations of any sort. Fact and fiction can safely take the same country road towards the wooden cabin near the Tatra Mountains where the penurious and ...”

“... discussed its size and significance. Before the archives were opened, estimates of the camp and prison population could only be made by assessing survivors’ reports, and by manipulating gaps in the statistics, the confidential but incomplete 1941 plan, and other indirect evidence. The estimates for the end of the Thirties ranged from Dallin and ...”

“... have lost. Yet a doubt hangs over the whole exercise, voiced by Dronke himself: did people like William of Conches or Hermann of Carinthia have any serious effect on society? Or were they, so to speak, the ‘literary theorists’ of their day: highly prominent and well-paid in their fields, but exercising zero effect on politics, mass media, society at ...”

“... of the Twenties and Thirties; like much new design of the Eighties and Nineties it has a slightly camp quality, as if it were imitating a long-ago imagining of the future. Also it stands alone, like Cesar Pelli’s more blockish but very American Canary Wharf tower, and its soaring glass surfaces, like Canary Wharf’s stainless steel ones, help make it a ...”

“... beach and jeopardise its secrecy? On an expedition to a nearby tourist island to buy rice for the camp, Richard is self-righteously disgusted by the loudness and sloppiness of those who inhabit ‘the World’. Then, just before sailing back, he comes across the body of a recently dead junkie, lying beside his sleeping girlfriend. In order to save her from ...”

“... The Chairman (pounding gavel): Just a minute – Mr Trumbo: Of an American concentration camp. The Chairman: This is typical Communists’ tactics. These grandiose gestures failed to impress. Public support evaporated soon after the trial, and the motion-picture companies, fearing boycotts, declared that the industry would not employ ...”

“... Ralph Rumney took up his camera and stalked Alan Ansen, Beat poet, paedophile and intimate of William Burroughs, publishing the finished product as a systematic collage called A Psychogeographic Map of Venice. More often than not, however, the city meant Paris. Like Benjamin, the Surrealists or indeed Baudelaire, the Situationists saw Paris as a topos ...”

“... feeling is that the No vote is crumbling. Fifteen per cent are still undecided, but the No camp gained significantly from the temporary release of the Balcombe Street IRA gang and the Loyalist killer Michael Stone. I remember die Kipling story, ‘The Village that Voted the Earth Was Flat’. I fear the flat-earthers and can’t be sure. Outside the ...”