“... Rot’ school of penology on this side of the Atlantic. With ideological encouragement from North America, the support of his Prime Minister and the acquiescence of the Labour Party, he has reinvigorated the arguments for the coercive and punitive aspects of sentencing, and made good his promise to Tory delegates not to flinch from sending people to ...”

“... France between 27 March 1942 and 22 August 1944: Convoy One, Drancy, the main transit camp on the north-east outskirts of Paris, to Auschwitz, 1112 men, mostly French nationals, none chosen for immediate gassing, 22 survivors in 1945, through Convoy 46, 9 February 1943, 1000 deportees, of whom 816 were gassed on arrival and 22 survived (15 men, seven ...”

“... scornful description of some American prisoners of war, cleaned up and paraded before her by her North Vietnamese hosts. The American boys were uncouth and uncultured, she complained, capable of expressing interest only in how the Chicago Cubs were doing. (It might have occurred to her that prisoners in danger of being beaten and tortured might well be ...”

“... by the police for refusing to comply with segregation laws. He served 22 days on a chain gang in North Carolina in 1947 for his part in the first Freedom Ride organised by the Congress of Racial Equality and wrote a chilling account of the experience. Altogether, he was arrested 24 times. He adhered always to the principle of non-violence and this brought ...”

“... was the loser. Even Peter Flannery’s triumphant mid-1990s nine-parter Our Friends in the North was shown despite rather than because of the prevailing BBC ethos. Michael Jackson, then head of BBC2, described the serial as ‘without doubt the contemporary drama event of the year’ (not least because it took half of BBC2’s entire drama budget to ...”

“... cause as Elliot Abrams, John Bolton, Douglas Feith, I. Lewis (‘Scooter’) Libby, Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz and David Wurmser. As we shall see, these officials have consistently pushed for policies favoured by Israel and backed by organisations in the Lobby. The Lobby doesn’t want an open debate, of course, because that might lead Americans to question ...”

“... explode in blood and there will be an exodus of yet more refugees. They are – from south-east to north-west – Artsakh, South Ossetia, Abkhazia, the two Donbas ‘republics’ of Donetsk and Luhansk, and Transnistria. Crimea, now formally annexed into the Russian Federation, is a borderline case. None of them is recognised as a sovereign state except by one ...”

“... right.31 May. A late birthday present, a mug dated January 1889, commemorates the gift by Colonel North of the ruins of Kirkstall Abbey to the then borough of Leeds. There is a picture of Kirkstall and the inscription: ‘Built in 1147. Destroyed by Oliver Cromwell in 1539.’ This was what most people believed in Leeds when I was a boy, the notion that there ...”

“... the importance of the day and the greatness of the scientist’. In Charlotte, North Carolina, there were performances of a one-man musical, Charles Darwin: Live & in Concert (‘Twas adaptive radiation that produced the mighty whale;/His hands have grown to flippers/And he has a fishy tail’). At Harvard, the celebrations included ‘free ...”

“... she was a feminist of sorts: earthy and independent; muse to a host of eminent men (Stieglitz, Paul Strand et al); lived almost for ever. Best of all, she is supposed to have celebrated – fairly unabashedly – something called ‘female sexuality’. Who can contemplate those swelling pink and purple flowers – or the roseate canyon-wombs opening up ...”

“... feed seven and, soon, nine or ten billion people. Most of this population is poor by European or North American standards and doesn’t constitute any automatic constituency for ecological restraint. Governments and corporations, for their part, have little incentive to slow, much less stop the general destruction. The collective activity of humanity is ...”

“... lore had Warhol moving into bed with his mother while his father slept upstairs with Paul and John [Warhol’s siblings],’ Gopnik writes. When Julia moved to New York to live with her son, people ‘thought she was stupid’, a friend said, ‘but she was brilliant beyond belief … and much smarter than Andy.’In high school, Warhol was not ...”

“... major song and Etta one of the supreme live performers. Once, at a surreal outdoor concert at the Paul Masson Winery, marooned among pre-tech-stock-crash Silicon Valley yuppies dutifully sipping Chardonnay, I watched her do the plumpest, most lascivious cakewalk imaginable. But I could hardly live on her for the rest of the day. I started squawking like an ...”

“... under. When corporate scandals first hit the headlines early in 2002, the US Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill attributed them to the immorality of a ‘small number’ of miscreants. Apparently he’d been misinformed. The rapacious practices of these executives and firms – whether or not technically illegal – are typical of, and endemic to, corporate ...”