“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... of party allegiance. Look at it from a Vauxhall local’s point of view: 1. housing is in crisis and desperately needs fixing; 2. the single biggest thing to be happening in the local economy in decades is a housing development; and yet 2 has nothing to do with 1, will not alleviate it in any respect, and may even (if it succeeds in flooding the ...”

“... have a history. It leans towards intellectual genealogy (neoliberalism traced to the Mont Pelerin group, or to Austrian economists, or American neocons) or to institutional analysis, as each element of our global order (tax havens, financial markets, welfare-to-work systems, enterprise zones) is brought under the microscope. But there is a bottom-up history ...”

“... Zedong and his colleagues decided to import vast quantities of wheat as a way to address the food crisis and, more radically, to change the staple of their 800 million countrymen: wheat has a higher nutritional value than rice. That year, a 25-year-old French grain trader, Jean-Yves Ollivier, travelled to Hong Kong and crossed the Sham Chun River, the natural ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... and manifestations were to be found in Spanish history.’ Revising his earlier praise of the International Brigades, whom he had described as ‘the finest group of men I ever knew or hope to know in my life’, he now acknowledged that there had been instances of brutality among them and even of fratricide. But ...”