“... office, President Clinton was more parsimonious in granting pardons than any president since John Adams two hundred years earlier. But he made up for this at the end when he cast aside the ordinary process for handling federal clemency applications and, in the words of the American lawyer Margaret Colgate, ‘enjoyed a final unencumbered opportunity to reward ...”

“... and perhaps an apology, however belated, for past intolerance. ‘We were all to blame,’ Gerry Adams is fond of saying these days, referring to all manner of atrocities, from mass slaughter to the covering up of child abuse; and, however reluctantly, one must agree with him. What the pre-1916 vivid-faced idealists would have made of ‘Dev’s ...”

“... mind that King’s anti-imperialism had an impeccably American pedigree. In 1821, John Quincy Adams, the then secretary of state and son of a Founding Father, warned that if the United States went ‘abroad, in search of monsters to destroy’, ‘flashing … the murky radiance of dominion and power’, ‘the fundamental maxims of her policy would ...”

“... its name redolent of the marshes, did not welcome a diverse clientele. A 15-year-old boy, Rolan Adams, walking home through Abbey Wood, was stabbed and killed in February 1991. In July 1992, Rohit Duggal, a 16-year-old Asian boy, was stabbed by a white youth outside a kebab shop. The people involved in this and other incidents were known to the police. The ...”

“... Government had all along been engaged in dialogue not with the mere ‘pseudo-terrorist’ Gerry Adams but with the IRA itself, via intermediaries specifically authorised to act on its behalf. If this did not breach Questions of Procedure for Ministers, then it is hard to know how its guidance can ever be disregarded. When Ian Paisley drew this to the ...”