“... world and constantly execrated but never actually discussed. An exception is a little speech by St Christopher, the AA name of one of the alcoholics put in charge of Mungo, who makes a link with the upper classes, not an unusual suggestion in itself, but the angle is new:Well, they’re aw at it. It’s what us boys do when we’re alone. A bit of ...”

“... against Forth Valley Health Board, but that hadn’t happened either. The best the families could hope for, they were told, was a Crown Censure – effectively a ticking off.The Allans began to gather their own data. Alone at first, and then in collaboration with researchers at Glasgow University, they trawled through the records of hundreds of ...”

“... blindly to power and authority’.This will not do. They were ‘ordinary men’ – the title of Christopher Browning’s indispensable book – who shot, day after day, at close range, men, women and children by the hundreds of thousands. The social psychology of the past three decades seems to belie the notion that a deviant personality is necessary to ...”

“... one so far – well over two million words, and much more to come. Counsel assisting the Inquiry, Christopher Clarke QC, acting as a kind of master of ceremonies, opened the proceedings by saying that everyone present had read my various witness statements (and, later, Derek Humphry’s) and that he and other counsel representing interested parties had some ...”

“... table between John Standing, playing Nicholas Jenkins, and Jeremy Clyde, playing Roddie Cutts. Christopher Morahan wants our table to be having an animated and amusing conversation, with Sillery the life and soul of the party. There is one problem with this and that is that the MPs are played by London extras, a notoriously difficult, unco-operative ...”

“... when they invoked his right to publish a book that could elicit a plausible charge of blasphemy. Christopher Hitchens spoke early and courageously on those lines. ‘Behind the use of bleating words like “offensive”,’ he wrote in his Nation column on 13 March 1989, ‘one can sense abject trahison: the ecumenicism of the philistines’; as for ...”

“... to be a family. Marten weighed the certainty that her baby would be taken into care against her hope that they might somehow find a way to stay together. Once that decision had been made, rationality, the capacity to compare one set of possible outcomes to another, disappeared. They behaved like people in the grip of a desperate compulsion. This must have ...”

“... soldiers: Nigel Coupe of the Duke of Lancaster’s Regiment, and Jake Hartley, Anthony Frampton, Christopher Kershaw, Daniel Wade and Daniel Wilford of the Yorkshire Regiment. All except Coupe, a sergeant and father of two children, were aged between 19 and 21. They died in Afghanistan in March 2012, out on patrol in Helmand province, when their Warrior ...”

“... murder but later boasted about it, was recharged and pleaded guilty. This gave Sharon fresh hope. If Dunlop could be hauled into court again, why not Heron? Especially if they could find new DNA evidence. Sharon understood how newspapers work. She summoned journalists to Nikki’s grave and told them she wanted the body exhumed so fresh tests could be ...”

“... notice – Saucy Harry and his moll will be at Chester to eat their Christmas dinner, when they hope Sarcer and the rest of the fraternity will meet them at the union – 14 Nov. 1865’; ‘Wild Scoty, the celebrated king of the cadgers, is in Newgate, in London, going to be hanged by the kneck till he is dead, this is a great fact – written by his ...”

“... he’d call it a night. A more congenial cruising ground, at least in milder weather, was along Christopher Street. I enjoyed sitting with him on the stoops and taking in the world while he was taking in the talent. One time we were sitting there, probably around midnight, and two straight guys walked by, probably Jersey boys, and muttered something about ...”

“... expressed itself in lengthy procedures that offered undocumented migrants some grounds for hope. Under Trump, judges are being pressured to dismiss cases altogether, a cynical tactic that exposes migrants to the body snatchers, and around 150 have been sacked (immigration judges are not part of the judiciary proper, but employees of the Department of ...”

“... had told me ten days earlier that Che Guevara’s guerrillas were encircled and that they had no hope of escape. Now he informed us that Guevara had been captured and was dead. Many of the Army’s High Command, including General Alfredo Ovando Cándia, the Bolivian Vice President, flew in from La Paz in an ancient DC6 that afternoon.By early evening, the ...”

“... like that.’ ‘And how did that change?’ Ramona said a single word: ‘Rob.’ The days in St Christopher Place were almost languorous. We would bring coffee back to the flat and spread out, and I’d try to build a picture of how he did what he said he did. We put up whiteboards and he bamboozled me with maths. Sometimes he would write at the board for ...”

“... meals on the wards. Nadia could be seen at a high window with her husband, waving a flag when all hope was gone as the fire raged through the building later that night. Emergency calls made by the Choucairs suggest they believed to the last that the helicopters above the tower could save them. They died with their three girls, Mierna, 13, Fatima, 11, and ...”