“... 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 ...”

“... like ‘being of the people’) remained relatively superficial. It was the Slavophiles, a group of Herder-inspired intellectuals based in Moscow, who first developed narodnost into a potentially subversive doctrine. While they rejected revolution or political reform, they believed that the communitarian, pious, localist beliefs they attributed to the ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... most scholars believed) but to society as a whole: the Islamic state should be ruled by a group of clerics; even, he hinted, by ‘a single man’, though he could not be a monarch, since Islam was inherently hostile to monarchy. This would have come as news to clerics who had supported Iran’s monarchs since the founding of the Safavid dynasty in ...”

“... terror bombing imitates Nazi practices. He extended his service in the Marine Corps until the Suez Crisis had passed. When President Eisenhower forced the British and French to end ‘their Suez adventure’, he was ‘surprised and proud as an American . . . When I picked up European magazines and saw photos of what our allies’ bombing planes had done to ...”

“... Party member and his semi-marginalisation as an academic during the Cold War; his reactions to the crisis that engulfed the Communist movement with Khrushchev’s revelations and the Hungarian Revolt in 1956; the reasons he stayed in the Party after most of his fellow Marxist historians had left, and believes his choice was more fruitful than theirs; how he ...”

“... for the radical populists of the PAC and the ANC Left. The most publicised members of this latter group are Harry Gwala, the Natal ANC-SACP leader, Winnie Mandela and the ANC Youth League leader, Peter Mokaba, whose chanting of the old ANC slogan ‘Kill the Boer, kill the farmer’ has triggered predictable reactions on all sides, including some public ...”

“... to place the emphasis on ‘communist’ as much as ‘intellectual’, interacting mostly with a group of cosmopolitan and international students, some of whom became leading politicians in their countries. But while he would argue the night away, he neither shared the love of secrecy and homosexuality of the (slightly ...”

“... but individual portraits were not what she did best. Political and military leaders at a moment of crisis, sometimes sensing that they were not quite up to the challenge, sometimes intolerably bound by bureaucratic rules not of their own making, received sympathetic treatment from this woman, who insisted that history was about persons capable of affecting ...”

“... a circus, but a disease and that it was contagious. Today, six years after New York’s financial crisis was precipitated by the refusal of the major New York City banks to underwrite one of the City’s routine bond issues, New York’s prospects seem healthier, and the lessons to be learned from its fiscal tightrope act seem more appropriate for less ...”

“... His immediate challenge was to pass a recovery act in order to deal with the deepening economic crisis that followed the collapse of Lehman Brothers. Obama did what he could to reach out to Republicans in Congress, trying in his way to make good on the botched promise of McCain’s earlier attempt at bipartisanship. He hoped to peel off a few Republicans in ...”

“... I was quite sure that there needed to be a big change. Finally I managed to make contact with a group who put out a samizdat journal called Varianti. This group, centred on people at the Institute of World Economy, was opposed both to the existing system and to the dissidents. Strongly anti-Stalinist, they were also ...”

“... era as a net debtor nation. Saudis live in a state of tense expectation, fearing that one or other group of fundamentalists will stage a coup or that the Government will use them as a pretext to declare martial law and duck out of political reform. ‘We know the countdown to something very bad has begun,’ one of many necessarily anonymous insiders to whom I ...”