Choke-hold

As Simon's obnoxious protest began to draw local attention, the bouncer slipped up behind him and repeated Mike's earlier choke-hold . . . with escalated force.

“Woman,” Philip interrupted her, “how do you expect them to be able to talk when you have them in a choke-hold?”

In The World Crisis, his 1927 history of the First World War, he had called the struggle between British sailors and German U-boats 'in scale and in stake the greatest conflict ever decided at sea', and he remembered all too clearly the dreadful choke-hold of the 1917 German submarine blockade.