“... just seen his former lover, Hanna Schmitz, convicted of war crimes: she had been a concentration camp guard, something he hadn’t known when she seduced him as a 15-year-old boy. None of the roles he saw played out in court appeals to him: ‘Prosecution seemed to me as grotesque a simplification as defence, and judging was the most grotesque ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... narrative finds Orwell working for the BBC during the Second World War, in the cubicle next to William Empson. Orwell immediately propositioned Empson’s partner, Hetta Crouse, but to no effect. ‘It was the smell, Empson grimly implied.’ Sutherland reports that Hetta and Orwell’s first wife, Eileen, were in agreement about the deterrent of ...”

“... salaries and business interests, fought with police as they tried to force an entry and set up camp outside. Suppose that tens of thousands blocked approach roads from Harrow to Trafalgar Square with demonstrations, occupied a full square mile of central London, disrupted a state visit of major importance, extended their stay for more than seven weeks and ...”

“... political prisoners, Ledy Castro, and he reports on the horrible treatment of another, the late William Beausire, but his book is not much concerned with Pinochet’s penal atrocities. Although Gould, as an editor, had been ‘instrumental in publishing, in New Society’, articles about Pinochet’s savagery by Ariel Dorfman – ‘an exile who seems to ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... budget has increased by between 17 per cent and 25 per cent every year, and by 1983 its new chief, William Casey, was able to boast of a new record in the scale of covert operations – the putting into the field of a ‘secret army’ of 10,000 Somozista ‘contras’ against Nicaragua. One former CIA employee estimates that there has been a fivefold ...”

“... historical writing as there was on the subject – the work of the Anglo-German economic historian William Otto Henderson was the outstanding instance – tended to focus on refuting the allegations of violence and brutality that had led to the empire’s dismantling and redistribution at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919. By the 1960s these arguments were no ...”

“... Before the Kinder were sent to foster homes, most spent some weeks in a Butlin’s summer camp at Dovercourt Bay near Harwich. The huts weren’t built for the severe winter of 1938, and Segal sat in coat and gloves writing letters to convince the refugee committee to help. In one ‘tear-jerker’, she compared her parents to a snow-covered rose ...”