“... to explain the emergence of clusters of industrial specialisation which could in turn drive international trade, not as a result of natural comparative advantage, in growing bananas for example, but in manufacturing high-end products such as German-badged motor cars. It was theoretically elegant and it explained why, in the golden age of economic growth ...”

“... daily in Britain during the Thirties – that had fallen on hard times. In 1961 the International Publishing Corporation had bought the loss-making Herald as part of a deal involving the acquisition of several lucrative magazine titles. Hugh Cudlipp, chairman of IPC, had given the unions a guarantee to keep the paper going for seven years, and ...”

“... political life, but I am not sure it is a good principle on which to build an academic discussion group. It was probably inevitable, though. Being ‘on the right’, Aron was an untouchable for most French academics. They might have wanted to benefit from his teaching, but they did not want to be seen to do so. I remember an episode that encapsulates this ...”

“... see, were mainly colourful shreds of plastic ingested in the absence of natural pasture. I asked a group of men in Haro Sheikh if more camels, the most valuable livestock in the local pastoral economy, had died. They all began pointing at once. ‘Behind that tree,’ one said. ‘And another there.’ ‘And there.’I had left Hargeisa, Somaliland’s ...”

“... were sometimes initiated from below. In 1948, when I reached Edinburgh, the national Historians’ Group had resolved to give its work a more practical turn by trying to form local groups, which would study local history and feed information into the publicity pipeline. I found a few individuals interested in the idea, among them a bricklayer who spent his ...”

“... the biggest event in rugby outside the quadrennial World Cup, and the T20 World Cup, the biggest international contest in the most popular form of cricket. And then there are all the regular annual contests, from the four tennis slams to the four golf majors to everything else. There’s a lot of sport – and that means a lot of cheating too.There is a ...”

“... prison they simply scratch lines into the paper or scrunch it up. They can’t write. The second group are silent. But when they take the sheet of paper they begin to write the most beautiful script, their sentences full of fire and argument. These are the child jihadis and their mothers tell them they will succeed next time. The prison isn’t big on ...”

“... outside: to turn the Social Democratic Party into a bigger and better version of the Manifesto Group or the Campaign for Labour Victory. That temptation is even more dangerous than the first. For the crisis which is now destroying the Labour Party is, in large measure, a crisis of ...”

“... Marshall Plan, which at the very least succeeded in giving Europeans the confidence to weather the crisis of 1947. While few historians now believe that the plan saved the economies of Western Europe, it did enable its leaders to overcome the crisis without slashing wages or welfare programmes, which would have risked ...”

“... How does anyone​ make sense of Britain’s rental crisis? Let’s start with Ruby’s story – and that of her landlord, which is inseparable from her own though they’ve never met. Ruby was born in Kent, where her mother had been sent to live as a teenager while under the care of a local authority in London, ‘a forgotten girl’, as Ruby called her, ‘shifted out to wherever was cheap ...”

“... Court in Dhaka to receive bail, following two months spent in hiding. A radical right-wing Islamic group’s most recent death threat, and the 4 June arrest order issued against her by her own government on charges of offending the sentiments of Muslims, had put her life in danger. She has been known in Bangladesh since about 1989 as a poet, columnist and ...”

“... the economist who had worked on the ‘500 Days’ programme with Shatalin and cooperated, with a group of US academics largely drawn from Harvard, on the ‘Window of Opportunity’ programme which represented the last of the efforts to force the Soviet Union to market. An intense and spirited man, Yavlinsky had refused to go with Gorbachev to the ...”

“... ruled out of order. In spite of these precautions, television would have a catalytic role in the crisis that led to the demise of the ‘Orange state’. When officers of the Royal Ulster Constabulary attacked a civil rights march in Derry in October 1968, the violence was filmed by a camera crew from the Irish state broadcaster RTE; its footage was ...”

“... a non-binding Congressional resolution condemning the genocide of 1915. The outcome was a minor international crisis. The Turkish Government was enraged and threatened terrible things if the motion was carried – among them, the closure of Nato bases, crippling Allied surveillance flights over Iraq; the blocking of billion-dollar oil and arms deals; a ...”

“... the ceasefire nominally agreed in September has been patchy at best. The effects of the Ukraine crisis on Russia itself have been visible everywhere, from the thousands of refugees from Donetsk and Lugansk now resettling across Russia to the fresh graves quietly appearing in scattered villages, containing the remains of Russian conscripts killed in eastern ...”