“... 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 ...”

“... longer essays of the period, produced every couple of years or so – ‘Writing’ (1932), ‘The Group Movement and the Middle Classes’ (1934), ‘Psychology and Art Today’ (1935), ‘The Good Life’ (1935) and ‘Morality in an Age of Change’ (1938) – are well known and much remarked on by critics and commentators, but this collection now makes ...”

“... faith in neoliberalism: he was marvelling in 2005, two years before the worst financial crisis in history, that economics had ceased ‘to dominate political debate’. He did feel, however, that a third-term Labour government was ‘struggling to fashion an appropriate response to the new salience of security and identity issues’. Goodhart ...”

“... the year, stoking it as well as channelling it towards his own political ends. In November a group of student demonstrators fired up by his anti-American rhetoric and calling themselves Muslim Students Following the Imam’s Line stormed the American embassy in Tehran and took 66 Americans hostage. November 1979 happened to coincide with the start of the ...”

“... by a police vehicle; a young disabled white man was killed by a police van accelerating into the group in which he was standing.Wetherell rightly points out that the term ‘riot’ is political. Of course, his preferred alternative, ‘uprising’, is also a political choice (I doubt he would call 2024’s Southport riots an ‘uprising’). Confrontation ...”

“... huge volumes of contemporary history. Stories which bring in two world wars or the coming eco-crisis or the sunset of Empire must break unities of space or time. The impulse to attempt them is easy to understand. A few square inches of ivory are too small to encompass the lot of the dead Lebanese and starving Africans who press nightly on the television ...”

“... dominions, cut off much of its food supply, and damage its trade and credit. Hale describes this crisis vividly, but, as she concedes, there is no hint of it in Titian’s art. ‘His terraferma – which was in reality devastated by warring armies, its farmhouses, fields and vineyards plundered by unpaid Venetian mercenaries as well as by enemy troops ...”

“... and was assured that they were. But soon after making his statement, McGregor was told by a News International executive to make certain he looked at the next day’s tabloids: she had, he said, arranged with some editors for pictures of herself and her children to be taken as she left a friend’s house. Sure enough the pictures were there the following ...”

“... and progressive statesman, who helped to restore his country to its rightful place in the international community, or as an unconscionable (alternatively: guilt-stricken) servant of the blackest tyranny, accomplice of infamous crimes.1 Chen’s study supersedes these antithetical images. Rather than merely applauding or attacking Zhou, it sets out to ...”

“... The soldiers of fortune who followed the wake of crisis in Africa during the Sixties and Seventies were almost always bound to clandestinity – the public bragging came later. In most cases they were sourly and implacably opposed to national liberation, which they saw as a Communist conspiracy on behalf of an inferior race that had failed to identify its interests with those of its betters ...”

“... in Damascus shows the Iskenderun region as part of Syria. But Syria’s case has received no international support. France’s last act in her nonchalant serial charcutage of Syria reduced its coastline to the provinces of Latakia and Tartus. That the infant democratic republic of Syria was not a viable state on its own was widely acknowledged by its ...”

“... time in Moscow, and some later left their children at an orphanage known as the interdom or ‘international house’. By the second half of the 1920s, a number of student leaders began to condemn the permissive culture around them and the campus became the site of bitter division. Chen faced criticism because her Shanghai-based boyfriend sent her an ...”

“... of them young men who had fled their homes in Sudan and South Sudan, are still missing. Amnesty International calls these ‘forced disappearances’, since the migrants were last seen in the custody of Spanish and Moroccan security forces. No autopsies have been performed on the bodies, and there has been no official investigation, so it’s impossible to ...”