“... measured strokes. Driven wild with pain I repeatedly screamed at the top of my voice. Then they held my mouth shut for a while and hit me in the face, and with a whip across chest and back. I then collapsed.2‘Arrests upon arrests,’ Joseph Goebbels noted with satisfaction. ‘Now the Red pest is being thoroughly rooted out.’ By April, 25,000 communists ...”

“... as the trial approached, his attitude changed perceptibly. Writing to his friend the journalist David Ayerst, Tippett declared himself ‘very much at peace and ready to go’.On 21 August 1943, at 7.30 a.m. precisely, after serving two months of his three-month sentence, Tippett was released from Wormwood Scrubs. He was met by Britten and Pears, who would ...”

“... to an age of lost naval greatness, ‘when no fleet was ever heard of except of our own people who held this land’. That was Aelfric in about 1000 ad, looking back to the glories of King Edgar’s day. After the Spithead Mutiny of 1797, Edmund Burke moaned: ‘Our only hope is a submission to the enemy … as to our navy, that has already perished with its ...”

“... Aesthetic (Ruskin). In the event, the conference was called ‘The State of British Art’. It was held in February 1978, ran from Friday night through to Sunday evening, and was packed out. It did not include figures to argue for Royal Academy traditionalism, nor popular painting, which had both been included in Towards Another Picture. Nevertheless each ...”

“... But Noel kept me in the loop, dropped by a couple of times a month with news about the agent David Obst or the director Peter Bogdanovich, both dying to do Mallory. He drank bourbon, and when his glass was empty he held it high and rattled the ice cubes for a refill. He stayed until the bottle was empty and it was time ...”

“... tolerance and his establishment of an anti-terror coalition of 41 Islamic states – the alliance held its first meeting in November in Riyadh – are hard to take in for those who were taught that jihad was a fundamental pillar of Islam. ‘No to terrorism and wayward thoughts,’ a government banner on a flyover in the Salafist stronghold of Buraydah ...”

“... dismissed him as ‘spit in the horrible communitarian soup’ and one of his former acolytes, David Watson, wrote a book, Beyond Bookchin, ridiculing him. Bookchin replied to Öcalan that he was too ill to correspond with him. Öcalan wasn’t put off. He believed Bookchin’s work showed a way for failed national-liberation struggles to transform ...”

“... being the buzzword for the shearing off of voter-unfriendly associations. Before David Cameron, or ‘DC’, as he’s known, took over in December 2005, Conservative strategists had noted anxiously that focus groups would turn against almost anything – even, or especially, tax cuts – as soon as they were told it was Tory ...”

“... him as ‘quite miserable-looking … so thin, so little, so miserable’. The art critic David Bourdon thought his art collection ‘stank’ and took the view that Warhol was nothing more than ‘a window trimmer and chichi East Side gadabout who hung around with trashy people’. In the world of commercial art, as photography began to overtake ...”

“... last year of the South East Fermanagh Foundation, a prominent Northern Irish victims’ group, David Hallawell, the son of a police officer killed by the IRA, said that ‘innocent victims and survivors have been betrayed and forgotten … for the sake of the government and votes on the mainland.’The main point of contention is that the offer of ...”

“... David Gibson was a man stiff and parsonical; by all accounts the sort of man who got things done. You could say he was obsessed with ridding Glasgow of its slums, with turning them into something bright and high and unquestionably modern. That’s what he wanted, and he’d already made vast advances towards getting it when he became convener of Glasgow Corporation’s housing committee in 1964 ...”

“... for the first day of his trial at Preston Crown Court; he is seemingly handcuffed with his hands held in front of him, but thus shackled has to negotiate the quite steep steps from the police van. At 84, he manages this without much help, which is more than I would be able to do even with free hands and four years younger. But why is he handcuffed in the ...”

“... or at least its dedicated mourner. He has written a polemic against John Major’s Government and David Owen, the EU mediator in the remains of Yugoslavia from 1992 to 1995, for their connivance in the ferocious dismantling of Bosnia-Herzegovina. He is keen on Major’s New Labour successors, and confident that Tony Blair’s support for the Milosevic ...”

“... was in shock: ‘I don’t remember how long the viewing went on, but there was so much drama. I held it all in. I would think: Wow, look at that person, they’re totally losing their shit.’ For years, she had dreams she believed were visitations from her father.The move back to LA to live with her mother full-time was brutal. ‘It was a one-two ...”

“... as close as we came to the death of the private landlord,’ Bano writes, ‘we never held up a mirror to that hungry maw’ to check that the beast ‘had breathed its last’. British landlordism has not only survived, but prospered. Today, HMRC estimates that there are 2.8 million landlords in the UK: more than 5 per cent of the adult ...”