“... James was typical of the guerrillas of Jackson and Clay Counties, the vast majority of whom were young and from prosperous slave-holding families. They were also merciless killers, and Stiles recounts their atrocities in detail. The killings were often revenge attacks and after the war, James continued to kill those who sought to resist or impede him and ...”

“... future if I wanted to. That’s the way it goes in borstals and remand centres: once inside, the young offender just widens his network of cons and connections. The teenage Krays, for instance, first met the Richardsons in military detention. The places I’ve mentioned were relatively high security – behind closed walls – but the site of Roger Graef’s ...”

“... a fatal car crash. They routinely installed GPS trackers on the cars of people they planned to rob, conspired to falsify accounts and documents to cover their tracks, and repeatedly perjured themselves on the witness stand.On 22 March 2016, to take one example, Jenkins and his team saw a black man with a backpack getting into a van. The van was being ...”

“... by ‘the imprecisions of Bills of Rights or the illiberal instincts of judges’. You do not rob a political decision of its political nature by entrusting it to appointed judges instead of elected politicians. All you do is convert the judges into politicians. If anyone doubts the seriousness of this objection let him consider just one example out of ...”

“... having been not-quite-obviously-Scottish-enough; he had the cheek to live somewhere else. Andrew Young, Edwin Muir, and several others, have been treated to petty discriminations of a similar kind.’ I suspect that Dunn himself is among those ‘several others’. Graham, it seems, was a drunk; and not a convivial drunk, but sour and contumacious. And he ...”

“... shouldn’t have been like this.’Many newspapers in the UK ran a picture of a smiling young white woman on their front pages last week. It’s rare for missing persons to make the front page, even if they’re children, and indeed the woman was no longer missing when her picture appeared on the homepage of the BBC and the cover of the Times, the ...”

“... caught in the passage in Maiden Voyage where a Chinese antique-dealer, complimenting the young Welch as a ‘handsome youth’, gives him a Ming blue-and-white artist’s brush pot. I flushed with pleasure and embarrassment as the dealer passed the brush pot to me. Before he put it in my hands he caressed it with a show of love; then he smacked his ...”

“... of a popular and oppositional British film culture. Indeed, its cast of gays, blacks and young characters made it seem a product of a hypothetical GLC film unit. Small wonder that Norman Stone bemoaned ‘the overall feeling of disgust and decay’ conveyed by the film and complained that Kureishi was inciting a ‘sleazy, sick hedonism’. Audiences ...”

“... the Uganda of General Amin, portrayed with increasing horror through the eyes of a naive young Scottish doctor. He evidently remembers Uganda very well (as I can vouch, having lived there a little earlier) and, in his second novel, it is obvious that he also knows Natal. Ladysmith tells of the 118-day siege of the British garrison town, the ...”

“... and ‘unimportant’ people who were the victims of her actions. The children and young men of the Mandela United Football Club, which she ran, hardly ever played football, but served as her bodyguards and vigilante enforcers, intimidated by her status and power. They were then caught in a legal spider’s web ‘through which the big flies ...”

“... never is; and it was decisively exploded in The Battle Lost and Won, where the focus shifts to the young soldier Simon Boulderstone and the superb evocation of his experience of the Alamein offensive – a rare achievement of informed imagination. It is then we realise that the real subject is the war. Not its causes, or its purpose, not primarily its horrors ...”

“... shift in their relations. The central action of the story, a menacing encounter with a group of young hunters, is but a dramatic reaffirmation of the looming threat, implied by his wife’s absence, to Mr Harrold’s way of life.What Carver does choose to present he depicts with a clarity born of a devotion to accuracy. Ezra Pound’s dictum, ‘Fundamental ...”

“... wickedness were felt in lands where the name of Prussia was unknown; and in order that he might rob a neighbour whom he had promised to defend, black men fought on the coast of Coromandel, and red men scalped each other by the Great Lakes of North America.’ ‘Evil’? ‘Wickedness’? The ability to employ these terms without awkwardness or ...”

“... from London regrets the decay of the relative clause in the speech and writing of the young. Songs punctuate the news to unpremeditated effect: Frank Sinatra, Petula Clark, Victoria de los Angeles, and, one morning, Yves Montand singing the favourite song of the Italian Communist partisans. It is difficult to exclude the external world if you ...”

“... from middle age onwards his own style of old devilry. The bad temper, the dislike of the young, the inflexibility, the walking sticks, what Jane Miller, in her beguiling series of meditations on being old in life and in literature, calls the ‘theatrical props’ of later life, enabled Amis to achieve old age before it could be thrust upon ...”