Two men were “in fear of their lives” as they ran away from men wielding a machete and hockey stick in the school yard of a primary school, a court has heard.

Imagine if a barely literate Ned Flanders climbed through your window and got his hands on your books. Your literature, your novels, your classics, your memoirs, your contemporary fiction, your cult titles.

A Chinese national spent half an hour in the Royal Canal on a freezing winter night after being pushed down a steep incline into the water by three teenage thugs who had attempted to rob him.