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“... the 20th century, every significant Latin American politician who won office by mobilising class grievances was quick to move to the corporatist right. Getúlio Vargas, within five years of becoming Brazil’s president in 1930, eliminated the considerable left wing of his coalition, consolidating his power to create something approximating a fascist ...”

“... which was not in favour of land reform. Torn by endemic struggles between warlords, with civil war shading into brigandage, and social, racial and religious divisions, Mexico seemed easy meat for further United States aggression, unless someone else got there first. Ever since the country gained independence in the 1820s, Mexican conservatives had been ...”

“... on the edge of the Cotswolds, where they strolled arm in arm, like lovers trying to forget the war. They had much in common: both were cultured Germans, refugees from the Nazis. But their secret meetings weren’t romantic – she was a Soviet spy and he a scientist who knew ‘the most dangerous secret in the world’. His name was Klaus Fuchs. A US ...”

“... career by any measure. In 1864, after only two years in office, Bismarck led Prussia into a war with Denmark over the independence of the duchies of Schleswig and Holstein. The Prussians entered this war as allies of Austria, but Bismarck exploited the ambiguities of the postwar settlement in the conquered duchies to ...”

“... who was then a foreign correspondent for the Chicago Daily News, didn’t cover the Arab-Israeli War in 1948. He was too busy reporting on the civil war in Greece. But on repeated trips over the next decade to what reporters and cartographers still called the Levant, one thing Sparks always came back to was the plight of ...”

“... as a lost masterpiece. The film never settles in form, tone or mood, moving from sharp satire and class observation to doomed romanticism. It undercuts its own realism with dazzling cinematic moments (the soaring camera abandoning the duel as soon as it starts), just as it offsets the seriousness of its wartime propagandist purpose with levity and wit. Watch ...”

“... on too, as an alias to practise medicine under, up to, during and even after the Second World War. Céline made money and leisure for himself from his books but he never let doctoring altogether go. His surgery hours were the writer’s field-work, because then he could be the licensed voyeur of the hurts and privations of his (working-...”

“... he was also said to have ignored the plight of the poor when he rebuilt Beirut after the civil war. For most of his political career Hariri backed the Syrians but last year began moving slowly and cautiously towards the opposition. It is said that the Syrian president, Bashar al-Assad, told him last August that ‘if you and Chirac want me out of ...”

“... Angeles Times from the beleaguered Armenian enclave headlined ‘A New Weapon Complicates an Old War in Nagorno-Karabakh’ featured interviews with civilians terrified by the buzz of drone engines presaging a hail of high-explosive bombs and rockets. Six months ago, Turkey’s deployment of its homegrown drones to ward off an Assad government offensive in ...”

“... caesura: an epoch dominated by the October Revolution, classical social-democratic working-class movements, and a Keynesian-Beveridge political economy, has now irretrievably passed. They also share the tendency to encapsulate the transition from one epoch to another in pithy slogans: John Lloyd speaks of ‘End-of-History politics’, for ...”

“... election will be a battle between rival sects of the same capitalist faith rather than the grand war of competing ideologies that we have seen in the past. The Tories are of course the party of sleazeocracy, and in their willingness to be bought there is at present a genuine moral difference between the two sects. How much this is specific to the Tories and ...”

“... victory in 1906 and to carry a series of important social reforms in the years preceding the Great War. But, in Parry’s eyes, the ‘gaggle of outsiders’ who ran the parliamentary party during the Edwardian decade had largely forfeited their right to be known as ‘Liberals’. Asquith himself may well have inherited his leadership style from the Whig ...”

“... party with modest redistributive aims. Its radicalism was not directed towards the working class, whose actual existence was beginning to be doubted by sophisticated progressive opinion, influenced by theories of embourgeoisement and by rapidly increasing real wages. Crosland had hoped for a classless society, which seemed an attainable aim – through ...”

“... of Burke and Adam Smith – but because of what has happened in the world since the Second World War. The various changes which have undermined the presuppositions of traditional socialism are by now familiar enough. But their cumulative effect has taken time to sink in. The failure of existing socialist societies to implement the traditional socialist ...”

“... can be found in his brief sketches of the gradients of Lyon, the long streets of Roubaix, middle-class houses in Touraine or the quality of light in the Ile de France. He can evoke, too, the inter-war years on the other side of the Channel, the ‘Bloomsbury boarding-houses kept by declining ladies, the stale smell of ...”