“... Eisenstein laid into rival claimants to a ‘materialist approach to form’ such as the Cine-Eye group led by Dziga Vertov. He complained that Vertov’s documentaries took from their surroundings ‘the things that impress him rather than the things with which, by impressing the audience, he will plough its psyche’. Documentary just wasn’t aggressive ...”

“... voted in favour of UN Resolution 660, which condemned the invasion of Kuwait ‘as a breach of international peace and security’. Hours later uniformed men confiscated our passports and told us we would be moved to another hotel as ‘guests of the president’. We learned later that the media had called us ‘human shield hostages’; apparently we were ...”

“... There was always at least one good piece in the Xinmin Weekly, published by the Shanghai media group, whose tabloid Xinmin Evening News was also much more popular than the Party broadsheet. I remember one cover story on the computer junk trade which described Chinese peasants breathing in toxic fumes as they dismantled mountains of VDUs and motherboards ...”

“... editor of the Burlington Magazine, perhaps best known for his scholarly work on the Bloomsbury Group, gives a detailed chronicle of the careers of the artists, whom he describes as loosely ‘entwined’ in a single history. He sees them, not so much as a ‘gang’, though that is how they are sometimes thought of, more as contributors to a loose art ...”

“... in April 1975 reads: ‘Given the purges, the mass killings, re-education camps and refugee crisis it bears asking if Ho Chi Minh’s vision of a unified Vietnam for the good of the Vietnamese people was achieved.’ ‘This is the United States Air Force’ (1968) by Văn Tho, at the Pritzker Military Museum Interspersed with what the curator ...”

“... Charles Wilson, who learned his trade on the news desk of the Daily Mail and left Murdoch’s News International to join Cap’n Bob as editor of Sporting Life. Mr Wilson has now re-surfaced as a senior panjandrum of the former Maxwell group, where he presumably had at least a small part in deciding whether the Sunday People ...”

“... DSO, saying in Our Falklands War: We were tasked to look for and find the General Belgrano Group. It was reported to consist of the cruiser and escorts. We located her on our passive sonar and sighted her visually early in the afternoon of 1 May. We took up a position astern, and followed the General Belgrano for over thirty hours. We reported we were ...”

“... Brezhnev kindly. At best, he is a pathetic figure with bushy eyebrows stumbling across the international scene, jovial but almost incoherent under the weight of tranquillisers, vodka and oncoming dementia. At worst, he is the man who unleashed the Warsaw Pact armies to overthrow the Prague Spring in 1968, who destabilised half the world by sending ...”

“... the party lists. Albayrak is minister of energy but is widely understood to be part of the small group that governs the country along with Erdoğan’s son Bilal and his daughter Sümeyye. The AKP provides the means for Erdoğan to manage parliament, mobilise voters and dispense favours in election campaigns, and develop cadres to fill the increasing number ...”

“... Horowitz is mired in past debates when he emphasises ‘the National Party’s advocacy of group rights’ or ‘reserved white seats’. The ruling party no longer bases its hopes on racial minority protection but on alliances with like-minded conservative forces across the racial divide –alliances which may well prove surprisingly successful once ...”

“... Mozambique. The campaign is patronised by many young right-wingers, including Marc Gordon of the International Freedom Foundation, an anti-communist organisation which enjoys extremist American funding. Like many Western ideologues who sup with the devil, Gordon has the long spoon of ignorance to hand: he has never set foot in Mozambique. In ...”

“... in religious life there was what the author well calls a drift to monotheism. Apart from a small group of intellectuals, prominent among them Porphyry, who attacked the basic doctrines of Christianity, pagans and Christians were getting closer together; there is some evidence that on occasion Christians were less resented by their pagan neighbours than were ...”

“... by which possible enemies turn into friends and vice versa is one of the most unpredictable in international relations. It can also be very fast. In the 1890s, Britain saw France and Russia as its most likely enemies and the British fleet was designed to fight their navies. In 1905, Britain negotiated a rapprochement with France and two years later with ...”

“... for the transparency of Trump’s real motivation (to shift the blame for his weak handling of the crisis less than six months before the presidential election). In a way, the episode was extraordinary, a notable moment in the coarsening of the US government’s diplomatic voice under Trump. But it was also in keeping with a pattern in the management of global ...”

“... lorries. In December sanitation plants shut down and sewage flowed through the streets. The water crisis worsened: more than 90 per cent of Gaza’s aquifer was now contaminated. As it became clear that unrest in Egypt wouldn’t lead to Sisi being ousted or to the return of the Brotherhood, Hamas saw only four possible exits. The first was rapprochement with ...”