“... of the British best and brightest. The failure of Wilsonism didn’t only break the heart of this group: it was in a very direct sense their failure too. And the result of that failure was not merely electoral defeat but a sense of intellectual disillusion and disarray from which the Left has never really recovered. Seared by that experience, the British ...”

“... is designed to frustrate such wishes, however. The World Trade Organisation aims to promote international trade and reduce barriers to the free movement of goods and services. The World Bank was established to support economic development and reconstruction, and the IMF’s original purpose was to oversee the smooth operation of the global financial ...”

“... once it was established, ‘family reconstitution’ carried out for a dozen parishes, a central group of experts using sophisticated numerical methods in Cambridge and the strengths of computerisation. So we have chapters in which the figures of events and base population are built up, and then chapters in which social and economic conclusions, based on ...”

“... in UN Resolution 1514. Britain abstained. The following year, in the face of an emerging international consensus on racial equality and self-determination led by former Asian and African colonies, South Africa was forced out of the Commonwealth. Decolonisation, as Nkrumah saw it, was no mere wind, but a ‘hurricane of change’ that was ‘razing to ...”

“... at least half the participants seemed to film everything they did on their phones. I remember one group of protesters who’d proclaimed themselves guardians of the revolution’s history: they were trying to obtain recordings and documents of every daily clash and bulletin, every song and chant, for an imagined ‘museum of the revolution’. One of them ...”

“... it might be asked, did Reagan expect? He had picked his Secretary of State from among the small group of men who had made the Nixon-Ford-Kissinger foreign policy. Such a person could hardly be expected to accommodate himself to the atavism of the Radical Right. Haig must have thought that the situation was tailor-made for him. Under Nixon’s Presidency he ...”

“... before his book has begun, is that ‘we have moved from an era that had faith in the idea of international institutions to one that has lost it.’ His story starts with the defeat of Napoleon, when the victorious kings and emperors decided that it was time to bring order to the continent of Europe. The Concert of Europe and its diminished successor the ...”

“... the US has a record of attacking the other signatories. The claim that Nato is unique among international alliances in duration and character is less a historical than a political assertion. Its 75th anniversary, arriving at a time when it has been rejuvenated by the war in Ukraine, has prompted a carnival of self-congratulation. In July, the leaders of ...”

“... on the work of intelligence services – the GRU and the KGB – and institutions such as the International Department to conduct a Cold War on the cheap. (The CIA-funded American Society of African Culture, by contrast, was known as ‘Uncle Moneybags’.) In the process, mid-level Soviet bureaucrats, or mezhdunarodniki, became what Telepneva calls ...”

“... that helped lock their countries into conservatism and underdevelopment for so long. Why has the crisis taken such a severe form in Europe? Part of the answer lies in the flawed construction of the European Union itself. Though Americans have been hard hit by the great recession, the US political system has not been shaken. In contrast to most European ...”

“... itself. Incorporating more than a hundred companies operating throughout the world, the Tata group sells gold jewellery, tea, clothes, health insurance, mobile phones and artificial intelligence, and consultancy services to governments and businesses. It produces cars, steel, electricity and chemicals, and runs airlines as well as luxury and budget ...”

“... once deeply tragic and electrifyingly exciting. For briefly what happened was that a quite small group of artists, architects and theoreticians found themselves seething with new visual ideas, many of these deriving from the larger Modern Movement in Paris, Berlin or Munich. Suddenly the old world and the old hierarchies collapsed around them, the artistic ...”

“... R., an elderly construction worker, was shaking as he got into our car. Two weeks earlier, a group of armed, masked men had broken into his house in the middle of the night and taken him away. He spent a day at the local base of the Anti-Terrorism Centre – followed by nearly two weeks in hospital. The interrogators accused him of supporting the ...”

“... me. Luckily her father distracted them. Looking out of the window on Sunday morning I saw a group of people in pink livery running down the street in a phalanx. Two red flags led the way. Revolution? No, the staff of a nearby hotel were responding to the Government’s call for people to ‘exercise vigorously to improve their immune ...”

“... Prendergast, a former Human Rights Watch researcher and co-founder of Enough, an anti-genocide group affiliated with the Centre for American Progress, who has called for military intervention to oust Robert Mugabe. It’s not just Americans: Michael Ignatieff ardently supported the invasion of Iraq in the name of humanitarian values. The inescapable ...”