“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... uncontrollable imperialist enthusiasms were bubbling up from the steamy undergrowth of pressure-group politics. These focused on Europe as much as overseas. A large chunk of Poland, annexed in the 18th century, belonged to Germany, and the government began to encourage ethnic Germans to settle in areas dominated by Polish-speakers, but although 130,000 ...”

“... wrote. ‘There are no safe areas in Rafah for Palestinian civilians. I call for full respect for international law and an immediate ceasefire.’ Macron had already marked his distance from Israel in April, six months into the onslaught on Gaza, when he signed a joint statement with King Abdullah of Jordan and Egypt’s Abdel Fattah el-Sisi calling for an ...”

“... both fought against Hanoi, in the Vietnam War and in the 1979 Vietnam-China border war, and so the international community, in one of its most shameful acts, kept the remnants of the Khmer Rouge alive long after 1979. Bunkered, after 1979, along the Thai border, the KR was part of an opposition coalition against the government installed in Phnom Penh by ...”

“... when he stood to receive the salute, he was killed in a hail of grenades and bullets, fired by a group of Islamist soldiers in his own army. ‘I have killed Pharaoh, and I do not fear death,’ the lead assassin, a 24-year-old lieutenant, declared. Only eight days later a new pharaoh rose in Egypt, and he has been in power ever since. Hosni Mubarak, who ...”

“... an occasional respite from the personal and political convulsions of 1956, that year of Communist crisis, but it was the first time since 1935 that American jazz musicians could be heard live in Britain. Until then the typical British jazz fan, well informed by Melody Maker and tiny argumentative journals, had lived essentially on a diet of 78 rpm ...”

“... role within the ANC itself. Its members have held leading positions, and through their links with international Communism were able to secure guaranteed supplies of arms and funds. They acted as the strategists of the movement, and as providers of ideological rigour. Events in Eastern Europe have therefore been of double significance to South Africa. On the ...”

“... and telephoto lenses, and entered into their symbiotic relationship with the police; a government crisis committee was formed under the name of COBRA; a psychiatrist was found to advise on whether they were serious terrorists or ‘nuts’. The long night of bargaining began. It was the South Moluccan train hold-up at Assen, the German Embassy siege in ...”

“... use of excavators. Gold was a minor industry in Tigray before the war, but the economic crisis and political fragmentation that followed resulted in a rush to open new pits, many of them funded by mysterious foreign backers and secured by local military might. The most lucrative ones are in the northern and western hinterlands, off difficult dirt ...”

“... pace militates against the patient economic excavation Hobsbawm practised in essays such as ‘The Crisis of the 17th Century’ (1954). If we move from the first to the second term of the programme of the trilogy, a different set of issues is posed, conceptual more than empirical. It might be said that these begin with the famous idea of the dual revolution ...”

“... Nigel Lawson became a non-executive director of Barclays Bank and an adviser within the Barclays Group. His two-day-a-week job was reportedly worth £100,000 a year. Shortly afterwards, he became a director of the GPA Group, then the world’s biggest aircraft leasing company, with a salary estimated at £40,000 per annum ...”

“... yet quite knows how to fit the lockdown years into their sense of themselves or society: neither a crisis nor an era, but some unnameable combination of the two. (Memories of the pandemic seem uncommonly dependent on stray artefacts from those years; I had one such jolt the other day, when I accidentally pulled up an email from summer 2020, informing me that ...”

“... for the creation of a true United Nations force flying the blue flag and operating through an international chain of command. By failing to avail ourselves of that provision we created at least the appearance of a Pax Americana, since it was the United States rather than the Security Council which took the key decisions. Is the United States equipped to ...”