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“... after coming under fire from their own side, who not unreasonably assumed they must be with the International Brigades.) Second, Fine Gael has a strong claim to be recognised as the most incompetent opposition party in Europe. It has never out-polled Fianna Fáil in a general election, always relying on the support of Labour and other groups during its ...”

“... 14 and was drafted without protest), he had been in basic training when, in the hut one night, a group of good ol’ boys had decided to have some fun with the only black soldier in the detail. The scheme was to castrate him. Nobody was more astonished than Ron to hear his own voice coming across the darkened bunks. ‘“If you want to get to him, you’ve ...”

“... This was a long way from his rhetoric thirty years earlier, when, as leader of the student group Fidesz, he had called for the withdrawal of Soviet forces and ‘the establishment of liberal democracy’ in Hungary.Zsuzsanna Szelényi’s detailed and authoritative study, Tainted Democracy, examines this transformation, drawing on her own involvement ...”

“... public policy think tank – much talk about ‘free speech, not me speech’ and ‘the crisis in authority’, much condemnation of ‘greenthink’ and ‘meddling policymakers’ – but which also functions as some sort of platform and refuge for people who used to be in the Revolutionary Communist Party, a British Trotskyist sect that had its ...”

“... his total public identification with Stalinism did him serious harm. His reputation among his peer group never quite recovered from his attempt to justify the charlatan Lysenko, whose views became the orthodoxy of Soviet biology in 1948. This doesn’t, however, explain his failure to make more than a peripheral personal contribution to the great revolution in ...”

“... I have​ just returned from Liberia with a group of physicians and health activists. We are heading back in a few days. The country is in the midst of the largest ever epidemic of Ebola haemorrhagic fever. It’s an acute and brutal affliction. Ebola is a zoonosis – it leaps from animal hosts to humans – which is caused by a filovirus (a thread-like virus that causes internal and external bleeding ...”

“... It was, as Patrick Wright puts it, ‘one of the last occasions, only two years before the Suez crisis, on which Britain exerted a decisive influence on international politics’. Zhou began to employ a ‘come and see’ strategy, inviting Western delegations to visit the People’s Republic and be shown its ...”

“... Banham became an assistant editor at Architectural Review and a charter member of the Independent Group, the extraordinary band of young artists, architects and critics (including Richard Hamilton, Peter and Alison Smithson, and Lawrence Alloway, among others) who developed, from within the Modernist Institute of Contemporary Art, a Pop sensibility of their ...”

“... rods, capable of being processed into the raw material of nuclear warheads, which precipitated the crisis in 1994. It is startling to remember now, when North Korea’s possession of nuclear bombs, and perhaps the means to deliver them, are facts of life, that to Clinton the mere act of reprocessing was unacceptable. As the White House contemplated a call-up ...”

“... within the rights of Oxford’s geography dons – world experts in ecological change and crisis – to deny him a platform or a job. Indeed, that is the whole point about academic freedom: it is the freedom to exercise academic expertise in order to discriminate between good and bad ideas, valid and invalid arguments, sound and hare-brained ...”

“... the first major conference of European leaders after the start of the so-called migration crisis – Niger’s president, Mahamadou Issoufou, presented a set of measures he would undertake to keep refugees from Niger out of Europe. The plan was designed by a group of European consultants he had hired as part of a ...”

“... cent, and his party hadn’t won a majority in either chamber – at the cost of transforming a group of criminals into enemy combatants, a status they had never aspired to. Above all, Calderón’s gesture had turned vast areas of the country into rebellious territories over which the government no longer had any influence. The president’s declaration ...”

“... into a mutually reinforcing and enriching economic bloc, finally capable of standing up to their international competitors (which had long since put up their own tariffs while ruthlessly exploiting Britain’s openness and good nature). Chamberlain guaranteed that as a result British industry would be rebuilt, unemployment reduced, and new forms of social ...”

“... preening is a relief. Although novels of ideas such as L’Étranger and La Peste brought Camus international renown, their success led him, and others, to misjudge his gifts. Ideas – his ticket to Left Bank intellectual circles – were never really his strong suit. He was a Mediterranean writer whose flair lay in his rapturous, often elegiac ...”

“... opprobrium following the 1995 judicial murder of Ken Saro-Wiwa, appeared to have persuaded the international community to accept his transmutation into an elected civilian president, through the five political parties he had created and funded for that purpose. Soyinka believed that his own presence on Nigerian soil, where he would make occasional ...”