“... that an ‘African’ was anyone determined to make a future within Africa. It was pioneered by John Garang, the leader of the Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA) in the south, as a way of holding together the New Sudan he hoped to see. In contrast, its exclusive meaning came in two versions, one hard (racial) and the other soft ...”

“... Islam after leaving Khartoum University and joined the Sudan People’s Liberation Army, led by John Garang. Nothing could be further from the Islamist doctrines Bolad had once championed – and nothing more inimical to them – than the ideology of the SPLA. Although Garang is a Southerner and many in his movement urge a separate state for southern ...”

“... way of saying "not yet” to somebody else.’ To illustrate what he means, he turns to John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty and On Representative Government – ‘both of which,’ Chakrabarty says, ‘proclaimed self-rule as the highest form of government and yet argued against giving Indians or Africans self-rule.’ According to Mill, Indians or ...”

“... of purpose are replaced by quantifiable results. ‘Goal displacement’ is also a major problem: where a metric is used to judge performance, energy will be diverted to trying to improve the scores at the expense of the activities for which the metric is supposed to be a proxy. As well as the likelihood of diminishing utility in terms of real ...”

“... revenue are likely to get worse quickly. Yet anyone witnessing a BBC news operation during a major story would think it had money to spare. It takes more than thirty BBC staff to cover an event such as the World Economic Forum in Davos. For Nelson Mandela’s state memorial service, there were more than a hundred. The only effective check on this is the ...”

“... innocent. A private marker placed in the Colfax cemetery in 1921 – at the tail end of the first major phase of Confederate commemorations – is more direct: ‘Erected to the memory of the heroes … Stephen Decatur Parish, James West Hadnot, Sidney Harris, who fell in the Colfax Riot fighting for White Supremacy, April 13, 1873.’ When EJI arrived in ...”

“... on a world at war’, Thompson shares space with some of her friends and rivals, particularly John Gunther, H.R. Knickerbocker and Vincent Sheean. Cohen is more interested in the personal lives of her subjects than in anything they wrote, an emphasis I found frustrating, even as I admired the stylishness of Cohen’s own writing. The broken ...”

“... justice: ‘Beckmann had no place in the advanced art world of the early 1980s – not one of the major modernist art historians ever reflected publicly on his art.’ This is true enough, and it took time for Kentridge to be appreciated too, but Koerner doesn’t reflect on why this was so. In his view, it seems, expressionistic ‘sketches of ...”

“... puppets. But his experience anticipated that of thousands of others. The first film we see by any major director usually makes a mark, but we don’t always feel we have seen Saturn swallowing his sons.The first Buñuel film seen by most people of my generation who were not film-club addicts was probably Viridiana (1961). After two Surrealist films made in ...”

“... to hoover up claims. By 1889 De Beers Consolidated Mining Limited controlled Kimberley’s two major mines, which had a combined value of £23 million. The company could now switch from surface digging to sinking shafts and invest in the automated sorting of diamonds from blue ground. As well as reducing production costs, they set prices by organising a ...”

“... of its electoral successes. Against the Washington Consensus, a term introduced by the economist John Williamson to describe the standard package of neoliberal reforms, stood the Buenos Aires Consensus, a manifesto signed in 2003 by the heads of Brazil and Argentina, Lula (Luiz Inácio da Silva) and Néstor Kirchner. Yet while Pink Tide governments mounted a ...”

“... can’t carry much at my age. A little pint bottle is quite heavy.’ He introduced me to John Russell, an 88-year-old ex-engineer in a residential care home. ‘I saw one old lady trying to stagger off with six bottles,’ Russell said. ‘They were carried for her by a complete stranger.’ He introduced me to Joan Bufton, whose daughter needs ...”

“... sharply cued: the irony of The Magnificent Ambersons is implicit. Welles always thought this his major effort; and there is hardly a performance of the 1940s to set beside the vehemence Agnes Moorehead brought to the role of Aunt Fanny. Welles’s own gradual descent, in the next two decades, into miscellaneous acting in parts that ranged from Mr Rochester ...”

“... special interests and ignorance. Hence, on the one hand, the adventures of people like North, John Poindexter, Dennis Ross, Howard Teicher and Michael Ledeen, and, on the other hand, the amazing pudeur of the Secretary of State, whose position on Irangate matters, according to the Tower Report, was one of complete detachment. Representative Tom Lantos of ...”

“... Pervez Musharraf. The single, strong parent in this case was a desperate State Department – with John Negroponte as the ghoulish go-between and Gordon Brown as the blushing bridesmaid – fearful that if it did not push this through both parties might soon be too old for recycling. The bride was certainly in a hurry, the groom less so. Brokers from both ...”