“... Robinson organised Cuban solidarity demonstrations, for which he was suspended. He and Blake also held political meetings for Black students, setting the scene for the emergence of Black Studies at the end of the 1960s. The Afro-American Association – a Berkeley student reading group which included Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale – envisioned Black Studies ...”

“... have done in reality: quite a few young non-Muslims believed in the Young Turks promise, including David Ben-Gurion, who went to Istanbul University to study law in 1912, envisaging a future as a community leader-cum-loyal official; in 1914 he personally raised a militia of forty Jews to serve the empire. For many in the Young Turks movement the response of ...”

“... Much has been said about Afghan corruption, and with justification, but many were aggrieved when David Petraeus, the commander of US forces in the country, said that corruption had been part of Afghan culture for ‘however long this country has … been in existence’. Many Afghans dispute this, saying that corruption was manageable under the ...”

“... might know its heroes. It’s ironic that Liudmila Saraskina’s deeply admiring biography of the David who challenged the Soviet Goliath should now appear under its imprint. As Saraskina tells the story, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, a Russian patriot and Orthodox Christian, was a man with a mission from the first. Unswerving, uncompromising, beset by perils and ...”

“... living, however eminent. Take Mike Newell, who wanted Rupert to do a bit of work for the role of David Blakely, the guy killed by Ruth Ellis, the last woman to be hanged in England. Newell wanted to see Rupert’s pain. But, as Rupert himself admits, he was ‘a riddle as an actor. On screen, I had a lot of “feeling” but I couldn’t really act. On stage ...”

“... fear of contradiction (or of lawsuits, at least) that action on Aids issues in New York was held back by Ed Koch, mayor between 1978 and 1989 and a closeted gay man. Elsewhere there’s a little blurring in the novel, and an inconsistent set of conventions in force, whereby Gay Men’s Health Crisis is named but Act-Up (the Aids Coalition to Unleash ...”

“... read many of the same books, from the same canon of French revolutionary literature. He respected David as a painter because of his ‘revolutionary classicism’ and, in his book on The Success and Failure of Picasso, he cites Bakunin’s typically anarchist dictum that ‘the urge to destroy is also a creative urge,’ comparing it to Picasso’s ...”

“... for Russia’, but given that everything gained from the most important source of all, Enigma, was held back, the Russians were always getting far less than half of what we could have told them. (No doubt the same was true in reverse.) This was, of course, a combination of circumstances in which the likes of Kim Philby were likely to thrive. For the two ...”

“... different inquiries took place into the conditions in which he and his fellow prisoners were being held. After the second, it was decided to release the prisoners on condition that they did not return to Ireland. Thus, in January 1871, O’Donovan Rossa arrived in New York; he was greeted as a hero.Among the friends he made in America was Patrick Ford, the ...”

“... genius and renown, the British and American mass audience was thrilling to the reborn version of David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia. The movie, which is the closest investigation most English people have made of their country’s long, intense, misunderstood encounter with Islam, is actually rather touching in its attempt to ‘understand’ the other by ...”

“... someone else back and that’s what neither of them was good at.28 March. Another death, this time David Storey whom I liked and found sympathetic, though I might run into him only occasionally and most often in M&S. It was always cheering, even if these days he was often shuffling as much from the medicines he was taking as from old age. But he would call me ...”

“... through all her work of the horror of human intimacy, of touch (‘a collection of bones loosely held together by a stained glove mottled skin’); the sounds and smells of those who invade private space. Theo Faron, the disengaged Oxford don with his ‘empty inviolate house’, reprises Kate Miskin whose great fear, in A Taste for Death, is that her ...”

“... harder from the south-south-west, taking the Armada clear of the Flemish Banks. Medina Sidonia held a council of war and it was decided that weather permitting they should return to Calais. Weather did not permit: the strong south-west winds, with a heavy sea, continued day after day. Effingham also held a council, and ...”

“... perhaps, on issues remote from the reading public’s own experience: they cannot alter strongly-held opinions formed in work-places, pubs, homes and in such places as the City. (The British pub is arguably more influential than the press in forming opinion on domestic policies.) Even the heavily-controlled press of Communist or other single-party countries ...”

“... devil, called Particular Propriety’, stood in shameful contrast to the early Christians who had held all things in common (Acts 2.44). Linklater himself used to believe passionately in Winstanley’s ideals and ‘lived for longer than was sensible on communes in the United States and Europe, farming unproductive, steeply sloping fields locked away in the ...”