“... launched by ‘three hundred Jews, Illuminati and Freemasons’ with the aim of causing an international crisis and taking over the world. A cameraman and sound recordist arrived in my Cambridge office along with a glamorous female interviewer. She began, conventionally enough, with the Nazi economic recovery in the 1930s (though I should perhaps ...”

“... Dar Sila.Having ignored the Darfur war when it was at its fiercest, from mid-2003 to mid-2004, the international press and the NGO community seized on the subsequent violence in south-eastern Chad, far more accessible than western Sudan, as an opportunity to speak about Darfur. The same misunderstandings, the same simplifications of the situation in Darfur ...”

“... just as the paranoiac murderer can feel terrified of his harmless victims, so a dominant social group can perceive itself as threatened by the people whom it exploits and persecutes. As Norman Cohn has written in his masterly study of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, Warrant for Genocide, ‘what these people see as the enemy is in fact the ...”

“... There is, however, an opposing view, which holds that Central Asia is a small corner of minimal international significance, a semi-desert, with no outlet to the sea and a population set to be ruled for many more years by authoritarian regimes that have no interest in fomenting regional strife. Any competition between the world’s three most recent empires ...”

“... and restaurants were empty. In recent years, the tourist industry has been damaged by news in the international press about the Maoist guerrillas, who model themselves on the Shining Path in Peru, and whose ‘people’s war’ has claimed more than 11,000 lives since 1996. Even fewer tourists have ventured to Nepal since 1 February this year, when King ...”

“... to Nuclear Defence, a symposium on the moral aspects of the strategy of deterrence from a group of professional philosophers, take as their frame of reference the ancient doctrine of the just war which has inspired most attempts to create international laws of war. Resort to force should have a cause sufficiently ...”

“... interests. Action Française was not a political party but an extra-parliamentary pressure group and the face of French Fascism. It was supported by dissident nationalists, who after 1930 formed into vicious paramilitary groups. For some, the enemy was the global Jewish conspiracy, for others, international Communism ...”

“... tens of thousands of homes, schools and government buildings in its 22-day campaign last winter. International appeals for lifting the siege fell on deaf ears (though Israel did agree to allow in pasta). In March 2009, donors gathered in the luxury resort of Sharm al-Sheikh across the Egyptian border, and pledged $4.4 billion towards Gaza’s recovery. But ...”

“... level, Covid hasn’t stopped coming back to try the door. I have been reading books about the crisis – and many, many yards of journalistic commentary – for more than a year now, and it has left me feeling that Covid is an almost impossible subject to sum up, because we don’t know where we are in the story. The books written by frontline medics ...”

“... and remonstrating with May Hobbs, the forceful and ambitious leader of the Cleaners’ Action Group: ‘They haven’t got the time to run their own branch, May, never mind their own union,’ Alexander says, and a little later she’s pulling coins out of her purse for yet another donation. ‘A class gulf existed between our lives and those of the ...”

“... suspicious of élites, socialists could hardly avoid paranoia over such a blatantly hermetic we-group. From one angle, Gramsci’s life and writings were a final demolition of this preposterous polarity. His arduous scholarly background made him intensely aware of cultural differentiations, and of the impossibility of populist ...”

“... to the members and their local societies, whilst the substance was retained by a small select group. In any case, those members who were just interested in science could scarcely expect to have much influence compared with those who were entitled to contribute to it by presenting a paper. The real trick was to make sure that the affairs of this ...”

“... in homage to Hans Asperger, an Austrian paediatrician whose work in the 1930s and 1940s with a group of socially awkward, oddly precocious, rule-obsessed children – his ‘little professors’, Asperger called them – remained obscure until she and her colleagues recovered it. Until then there was almost no notion that a high-functioning variant of ...”

“... in a few days, when we met again, he would be a crackpot too. Some of these people turn up in The Group. At approximately the same time as Mary McCarthy was chivvying and being chivvied all over Manhattan, Saul Bellow submitted his first short story for publication in the student magazine of Northwestern University. (It took third prize in the ...”

“... his rollercoaster time in Downing Street, punctuated by the gut-wrenching drama of the financial crisis, there should have been plenty of arresting moments to choose from. Some, though, are already taken. Alistair Darling, for instance, starts Back from the Brink, his 2011 account of what it was like being Brown’s chancellor, on Tuesday, 7 October ...”