“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, the former Shah of Iran, haunts the international stage like a latter-day Lear. In the loneliness of his exile he is bitter about his former allies and still incredulous at the way his throne was ripped from under him, his dream of Iran as a world power shattered by revolution and an Islamic republic brought into being ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... to the Guardian newspaper. In 1986, if Bernard Ingham’s book is to be believed, during the crisis about the Westland helicopter company, Leon Brittan, Secretary of State for Trade and Industry, allowed his head of information, Collette Bowe, to read out to the Press Association a letter from the Solicitor-General to the selfsame Secretary of State for ...”

“... long-time premier Mehmet Shehu had committed suicide the previous night ‘in a moment of nervous crisis’. Although suicide is generally frowned on in the Communist countries – who, after all, could possibly wish to depart from paradise? – the radio referred to Shehu as ‘comrade’ and gave him his full ritual titles. Nearly one year later Albania’s ...”

“... An interstate dispute is conducted by the representatives of sovereign states within a defined international framework and in accordance with well-established rules of diplomatic practice. A precondition for negotiations is recognition of the legitimacy and equality of the representatives of the other state. The subject of negotiation is not the status of ...”

“... Partly it is the consequence of Chechen fighters seeking safer havens outside Chechnya. The crisis is worst in North Ossetia, the republic with the biggest Christian population and strongest loyalty to Moscow. Its capital, Vladikavkaz, is a fine old garrison town stretched along the River Terek and a major industrial centre. It used to be the nearest ...”

“... ultimate political victory. This was not what Gramsci had believed. A revolutionary of the Third International, he had never thought capital could be broken without force of arms, however important the need to win the widest popular consent for the overthrow of the ruling order. But it fitted the idealist cast of the culture at large. Within the intellectual ...”

“... Colonel Chuck Cardinal, the director of the US Army Pacific Command’s inter-agency co-ordination group for counter-terrorism, who suggested that ‘Islamic extremists’ are like icebergs, floating, and mostly submerged, in a sea of ‘moderate Muslims’. So how are we supposed to spot them?There is no comprehensive list of possible indicators that someone ...”

“... imagined to be a lesser variant of the Japanese record, or simply a local version of a larger group that includes Hong Kong, Singapore and Taiwan. In reality, the experience of South Korea is unique. No other society in the world has industrialised in depth as fast. A historical process that took at least three generations in Japan has here been ...”

“... question is something of a non-story. We are exposed to such gigantic losses through the financial crisis that it doesn’t really matter if Sir Fred spends the rest of his life bathing in Cristal at our expense. The question of his pension has become a synecdoche for the more general issue of City bonuses, which to the City are a normal fact of life but to ...”