The Government is revolted by the horrible murder of the American journalist James Foley in Iraq, yet its predecessors of the early 1950s failed to react to an equally nasty incident in Malaya. A British soldier was pictured holding up the severed head of an adversary with his grinning comrades looking on. This picture appeared in the Daily Worker and circulated in my London college. Soon after my demobilisation from national service, I was then a graduate student researching for a master&rsquo