“... We found the grandmother crying loudly as the remains of her family packed. Around the front a group of men were bundling the entire contents of a small shop into a van. One of them spoke to us in German. ‘Yesterday fifty KLA men came here with masks and automatic weapons and told us to leave. I have a gun and could stay, but it’s the children. The ...”

“... its data on 4500 individuals, and on the work of an enthusiastic but by no means always unanimous group of researchers who have been active in this field in recent years. Morgan, who seems to have been single-handedly responsible for most of the 175 interviews that form the core of the book, covers some of the same ground, mainly for the 1920s, in his own ...”

“... at reading the human tragedies in the numbers. And with painstaking caution a series of reports by international and US humanitarian analysts have explained that there is indeed starvation in Gaza, despite Israel’s insistence to the contrary: the blindfolds are off.Even in its dying days, the Biden administration followed Israel’s script to the letter. In ...”

“... and Russia as at best annoying distractions from the world-historical imperatives of detente and international friendship among great powers. They dismissed Poland’s Solidarity in the early 1980s, and in more recent years have waved away Eastern European critics of Nord Stream as pathological Russophobes. The pushback against this tendency has sometimes ...”

“... history has not known since Gibbon. Here he is, introducing a very complex subject, the political crisis of 1931, which, occurring in the context of the Slump and the collapse of the pound, split the existing Labour government and brought about a ‘National’ coalition of Labour Right and Conservatives: ‘The new age got off to a good start. A ...”

“... are all equally powerful, is very hard to inhabit: which is why we should not dismiss the recent International Atomic Energy Agency report on Chernobyl when it says that stress caused by perestroika was responsible for more illness than the side-effects of the meltdown. Fear of living without an all-enveloping authority; fear that the Party, or forces acting ...”

“... Everybody agrees mat the British, and especially the English, are suffering from an identity crisis. The standard explanation is loss of Empire and failure to find an alternative role. And yet in many ways it was the Empire which sowed the seeds of our present uncertainties. Until about 1800 the lineaments of national self-identity were fairly clear, but during the 19th century what it was to be British or English became a far more contested question ...”

“... collected in Trevor-Roper’s Religion, the Reformation and Social Change examined the ideological crisis of the Thirty Years War and of the political revolutions which followed it. Catholics, Anglicans and Puritans, which contains five essays of an average length of about 25,000 words, is in effect a sequel to that volume. It differs from it in containing ...”

“... for a revival of the Olympics at a symposium at the Sorbonne in 1892, and in 1894 established the International Olympic Committee (IOC), which chose Athens as the games’ first host city. This month, after a gap of a hundred years, the Olympic Games will return to Paris for a third time.The first Olympics held in Paris, in 1900, were a farce. Coubertin had ...”

“... so, the CIA’s files needed updating. By the 1950s Haldane had left the party after the furious international dispute among geneticists surrounding the claims of the Russian agronomist Trofim Lysenko to have dramatically and heritably improved crop yields by simple environmental manipulations that flew in the face of conventional genetic ...”

“... flag is usually the first to be spotted flapping bravely over a muddy sea of refugee tents. The group, which won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1999, also prides itself on its readiness to ‘bear witness’ when politics intrude, staging high-profile pullouts when it feels it risks becoming complicit in a larger abuse. With his youthful ...”

“... The Dia Art Foundation has supported a select group of innovative artists with lavish patronage since its founding in 1974. At first, it favoured Minimalist sculptors such as Donald Judd and Dan Flavin and installation artists such as Walter de Maria and James Turrell, and certainly the early projects underwritten by Dia, from permanent exhibitions in New York City to massive earthworks in the American desert, were grand ...”

“... relations among the Uzbek, Kirgiz, Turkmen, Kara-Kirgiz and Tajiks, will untangle the network of international contradictions and in that way will clear the stage for the social, class war. The 1924 delimitation drew heavily on Soviet ethnographic and statistical experts, who were invited to establish where the ‘true’ boundaries of Kyrgyz, Tajik and ...”

“... been elevated to Seyyed Ayatollah Doctor Martyr Raisi. Billboards showed him managing the Covid crisis, greeting Revolutionary Guard commanders or meeting anonymous ‘regional’ rebels, with slogans to remind us that his loss hasn’t dented the country’s identity or priorities: ‘still jihad’, ‘still security’, ‘still populist’, ‘still ...”

“... at the periphery of Europe than it was to do so. The precise nature of each stage of the July Crisis, or of earlier crises, is less important to Tuchman’s cautionary tale than the dénouement: the failure of the great power blocs to negotiate their differences and the catastrophe that this failure unleashed. For the generation immediately following the ...”