“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... detention experience to be Club Med’.*On any given day there are at least 50,000 adults being held in Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention centres; at least 20,000 held by Customs and Border Protection, and between 11,000 and 14,000 children under 18 in the custody of the Office of Refugee ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... did his whitened bones glisten in the moonbeams; and as the wind shook the chains which held the body’ – he was enslaved even in death – ‘many a little negro who had strayed that way in search of guavas, fled from the spot, for fear of the “dead man’s jumby”.’A jumby, Flanigan explains, is a vengeful spirit that haunts a place or ...”

“... and San Francisco, conducting drug experiments on unknowing subjects in brothels or at parties he held in CIA safehouses. In his diary, White wrote frankly about the corruption, drugs, sex and violence in which he happily participated: ‘Where else could a red-blooded American boy lie, cheat, rape and pillage with the sanction and blessing of the All ...”

“... counties. Outside, eight hundred coffin-like replicas of the columns lie on the ground as if they held the remains of victims of a natural disaster or terror attack. They are waiting to be claimed by counties throughout the South and returned to them as memorials. Like other gatherings of names – the Vietnam Memorial, Yad Vashem, the Menin Gate and the ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... it could have got a flavour of either iron or leather. Nevertheless, these two great wine-tasters held to what they had said. Time went by, the wine was sold, and when they came to clean out the cask, they found in it a small key hanging to a thong of leather; see now if one who comes of the same stock has not a right to give his opinion in such like ...”