“... 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 ...”

“... control insist, of course, that everyone would be safer with his or her own weapon close by. A few international relations theorists have made a parallel argument about nuclear capabilities: if they kept the Cold War from becoming hot, why should they not work the same way now that the Cold War is over? Why, indeed, should We not encourage non-nuclear states ...”

“... seemed by any means moribund, even appearing to generate fresh energy and a new spirit, as well as international respectability, under Gorbachev’s reforms. The boldest forecasts saw another fifty years of Soviet rule in Central Europe, or if they were especially adventurous, a gradual erosion of the Communist empire: no one predicted the rush of events that ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... The numbers studying all arts subjects have gone down, with drama considered to be in a state of crisis. In 2017, UK schools had 1700 fewer drama teachers than in 2010. Over that period, the number of students taking drama at GCSE level fell by a quarter.It is worth putting all this in context. For the bulk of British history, most pupils who had the ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Studies at the end of the 1960s. The Afro-American Association – a Berkeley student reading group which included Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale – envisioned Black Studies as more than just an academic discipline. For Robinson, a few years their senior, it meant a revolutionary politics of Black liberation.Robinson started writing Black Marxism in ...”

“... of our counterfeit modernity, and I remember being struck by the shops abundantly stocked with international brand names and the material possessions that even factory workers seemed to have, with their scooters, televisions and fridges (but no unions to represent them). I was unaware of the tensions building up, though there had been signs: in 1984, at ...”

“... the resemblance between 1956 and 1968, remarking that ‘the New Left originated out of the crisis of the Soviet invasion of Hungary and the Anglo-French invasion of Suez.’ The concept of ‘the New Left’ was prominent in the commentaries of observers in 1968. The Black Dwarf (and I myself) were frequently accused of being New Leftist. The Black ...”

“... and of his attempt at the beginning of the book to situate Corbynism in relation to the enduring crisis of European social democratic parties and, especially, to the history of UK protest movements – graduates from which initially gave Corbynism much of its fresh and irreverent energy. Corbynism’s connection to protest underlines a perennial problem for ...”