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“... as any Communist leader to achieving some part of the ludicrous imperative to ‘make the working class the ruling class’. Now, the workers are one of the largest constraints on a pro-capitalist government: to create capitalist structures, the government must strip them of power, security and, in the first stage at ...”

“... acquired that distinctive, delicious air of normality in a time of upheaval, when life and war brush shoulders, both waking up each morning bemused and surprised to find that the other still exists. The park, perched on the edge of a vast building site that was threatening to consume it, became a tent city and a centre of protest for all kinds of noble ...”

“... butchers wouldn’t in any case be its usual retail outlet and certainly not Bennett’s High Class Meat Purveyors of Otley Road. What about trotters, were they on the ration? No, and tripe certainly wasn’t, though even at 81 it still seems droll to me to be regarded as a historical repository or the oldest inhabitant. The VE Day programme treated ...”

“... and grew up in Katamon, a neighbourhood dominated by Christian Arabs before the 1948 War. (A third son, Iddo, was born in 1952.) In 1963, the boys were uprooted when their father, convinced that he had been blacklisted by academia, moved the family to Elkins Park, a leafy suburb of Philadelphia. For a Revisionist family, leaving Israel was no ...”

“... paused; he didn’t want to mislead these people: what was on offer was not a ‘humanitarian war’ but an informal Camp David. ‘It needn’t even be the United States,’ he continued. ‘It could be a great man. It could be Nelson Mandela … or Bill Clinton.’The beards were unimpressed. One of the few beardless men in the audience rose to his feet ...”

“... African regimes, ‘free world’ or Soviet bloc patronage and, in the aftermath of the Cold War, from the stultifying institutions which all of these have bequeathed to Africa. Despite its terrible difficulties, Davidson’s Africa is a continent of hope. In both the customary and the more fashionable sense, his work is affirmative – often stubbornly ...”

“... of the most glittering constellations of the new century. Burgeoning before and during the Great War, its native development was largely cut off by the Russian Revolution. The Bolsheviks, who came from the earlier style of intelligentsia, had little understanding of the value of the newer one, and – in no mood to tolerate disinterested research or deviant ...”

“... the door to universal murder.’ Zawahiri finally set Egypt aside to concentrate on bin Laden’s war against America only in 1997, when Egypt as a whole turned against his methods in revulsion. The catalyst was an attack by a group of Zawahiri allies on tourists at Luxor. A small group of jihadis in police uniforms crippled any tourists within range by ...”

“... One of Devine’s important achievements is to remind us that Lowland Scotland also had a peasant class that was dispossessed, its fate obscured by the ‘extraordinary glamour’ of Highland culture which, ‘whether in authentic or invented form … has marginalised the history of the rural Lowlands’. The disappearance of this ...”

“... yard. Police patrolling the outside of the yard. We thought: “What the hell’s this? Is it a war?” Which is what it turned out to be, virtually.’The police marched up to the bottom of the rig and shouted up to the men. Increasingly militarised and emboldened by their new powers, they were spoiling for a fight. ‘They said: “Some of ours may get ...”

“... Fitzgerald’s ardour; he believed that was how a young man of talent should feel. The Great War soon parted and changed them. Wilson went to France to work in a military hospital close to Verdun, where he learned to line up bodies on the floor as casually as he had once arranged books on a shelf. Fitzgerald never got to the ...”

“... in itself. The late Stuart Burge, the theatre director, was hidden here as an escaped POW in the war, which I took to mean he spent this perilous time in the bosom of the family. Stuart always played this down and now I can see why, as he may well have been lodged in some attic or vestibule of this vast complex, never setting eyes on the Doria-Pamphilj ...”

“... shot dead as a traitor to Islam. Already a partial wreck, Pakistan could be destroyed by a civil war. The terrorists who carried out the killings in the US were not bearded illiterates from the mountain villages of Afghanistan. They were educated, middle-class professionals from Egypt and the Hijaz province of Saudi ...”

“... Progress and The Rights of Man are the two ‘foundation texts’ of the English working-class movement. It is above all in John Bunyan, he argues, that we find ‘the slumbering Radicalism’ which was preserved through the 18th century, and broke out again and again in the 19th. Bunyan was born in a cottage on the edge of Elstow, a village near ...”

“... leadership’. There was a time when this meant leading by example, but since the Second World War, the phrase ‘global leadership’ has served as a euphemism for military intervention – multilateral if possible, unilateral if necessary. Indeed, exceptionalism has proved a durable justification for unilateralism. Presidential candidates from both ...”