“... draconian reforms – reforms that, Julius Nyerere and Michael Manley charged at the South-North Conference held in Arusha in 1980, were undermining the sovereignty the new states had ostensibly just won. This was the year sub-Saharan debt reached $84 billion; by 1995 the figure was $220 billion (and the total Third World debt $2 trillion). Sasson ends ...”

“... from the South as part of the Bargain of 1877 that ended Reconstruction were deployed in the North to suppress a national railroad strike. Meanwhile, the army was battling Indians in the West, bent on opening their lands to exploitation by railroads, mining companies and farmers. Native Americans did not think the federal government was in ...”

“... of 1949 was designed to challenge the ‘false doctrines’ of communism in the Third World. John F. Kennedy set up the US Agency for International Aid in 1961 and in 1971 USAID was joined by the Overseas Private Investment Corporation (which was absorbed into the Development Finance Corporation in 2019). In the eye of this hurricane of acronyms, two ...”

“... ties with Russia. But it proved as ruinous as Egypt’s intervention in the civil war in North Yemen in the 1960s, which Nasser described as ‘my Vietnam’. Not only did Hizbullah lose thousands of fighters: the party of resistance was now the party of counterinsurgency against fellow Arabs, and its collaboration with Syrian and Russian ...”

“... emerging local elites. In the mid-20th century, Nigerians began publishing adverts for pen pals in North American newspapers, promising ivory or ebony knives in exchange for cash advances – the requests were signed off with made-up royal titles. ‘Generous, but possibly gullible, American citizens have allowed themselves to be taken in by African ...”

“... know where they are. They’re in the area around Tikrit and Baghdad, and east, west, south and north, somewhat.’ I heard the US was building 14 ‘enduring bases’, capable of housing 110,000 soldiers, and I heard Brigadier-General Mark Kimmitt call them ‘a blueprint for how we could operate in the Middle East’. I heard that the US was building what ...”

“... as the debating triumph it would have achieved would have come at too high a political price. John Major’s government survived its Commons ordeal on Scott because of the decision to abstain by the three members of Ian Paisley’s Democratic Unionist Party. One of the three, the Reverend William McCrea, was reported as having asked, shortly before the ...”

“... for Israel, reputedly ‘good’ with black people, he is moreover young and once shook hands with John F. Kennedy. At the bar of the Sheraton Wayfarer in Manchester, the HQ of the travelling press corps, most correspondents report that their editors only want good news about the new consensus candidate. And, generally, that’s what they have been getting and ...”

“... came across: much of Hunky Dory consists of pastiches of Bowie’s musical heroes of the 1960s – John Lennon, Syd Barrett, Anthony Newley, Bob Dylan, the Velvet Underground. Which would make Ziggy Stardust the beautiful butterfly that emerged from the chrysalis. Paul Trynka begins his biography with a description of Bowie’s performance of ‘Starman’ on ...”

“... girly-boy who hymned his cheap-suit backstreet bohemia over blackout power chords – as Smith’s John the Baptist. Horses betrays a love of early Kinks, Them, Who, but reframes their riffy aesthetic with studied artfulness. How much credit should go to the producer, John Cale, isn’t clear. Smith never sounded this ...”

“... the common disaster of the Second World War, when every nation-state between the Pyrenees and the North Sea was shattered by defeat and occupation. From the depths of impotence and discredit into which pre-war institutions had fallen, a quite new kind of structure had to be built up after peace returned. The post-war states of Western Europe were ...”

“... with Cameron’s description of this as a ‘slight fall’. After the letters were published, John McDonnell hailed the prime minister as a convert to the anti-austerity cause. The unedifying spectacle of a prime minister ignorant of the impact of his own government’s policies, or so taken in by his ministers’ rhetoric that he could not reconcile ...”

“... by enlisting in a Global War on Terror. The terrorists, like the indigenous inhabitants of North America, would be defeated by American hunter heroes, fictional and historical: figures like Daniel Boone, Natty Bumppo and Davy Crockett – white men who replaced female captives as protagonists in the developing frontier mythology. In hunter hero ...”

“... country – Churchill most obstinately of all. Guy Burgess was one of those – James Klugmann and John Cornford were the chief – who helped to induct me into the Party. We belonged to the same college, and hence to the same ‘cell’. I remember Burgess as a rather plump, fresh-faced youth, of guileless, almost cherubic expression. I heard him spoken of as ...”

“... thoughts against thoughts in groans grind. For too long, Bishop had lived these moral choices of life/death, right/wrong, male/female: but at last, the early happy years with Lota had made them seem irrelevant, and Bishop, longing for Paradise since her blighted childhood, felt she had found it at Santarém: That golden evening I really wanted to go no farther; more than anything else I wanted to stay awhile in that conflux of two great rivers ...”