“... have changed since the campaign … We’ – meaning Americans – ‘are now in an energy crisis.’ A few days later Vice-President Dick Cheney, like Bush a Texas oil industry veteran, announced a new American policy of generating more energy, rather than conserving existing supplies, and predicted that the US would need between 1300 and 1900 new ...”

“... have been given only walk-on roles in the Cabinet, while younger recruits to Benn’s Campaign Group, such as Paul Boateng and Dawn Primarolo, have not been allowed to speak in their own voices by Gordon Brown. No one has been more aware of the collapse of the Bennite agenda than Benn himself. His volume of diaries from the 1980s – The End of an Era ...”

“... countries. The modern upshot is an ambivalence (among groups outside the Anglo-American group) about both assimilation and Americanisation, an ambivalence that has provided some of the political support for multiculturalism. Making Americans is part history, part cultural commentary, part policy prescription. Yet both the commentary and the ...”

“... in another document held at West Point, the organisation in Iraq now faces an ‘extraordinary crisis’, with volunteers showing ‘panic, fear and the unwillingness to fight’. The terrorist group’s security structure, he concluded, has suffered ‘total collapse’. And so the front line of this war has moved to ...”

“... movie depicts the covert rescue of six US embassy workers caught up in the 1979-81 Iranian hostage crisis; the CIA used a fake film-shoot – of a schlocky sci-fi story called ‘Argo’ – as cover for spiriting the diplomats out of Tehran. American audiences seemed to enjoy the joke. Argo won three Oscars and earned a presidential stamp of approval when ...”

“... public positions; acompulsory coalition at the top between the leaders of the groups and a mutual group veto on matters to be decided in common. These ideas are discussed in the first two of the books under review; they were the main theme of a conference staged in New York in October 1978 by Dr NicRhoodie’s Institute for Plural Societies at the University ...”

“... complete strike of dockers in Liverpool and Birkenhead since 18 September. In London, the Royal Group, West India and Millwall docks, and to a lesser extent London and St Katharine’s docks, have also been affected. These strikes, which are unofficial, now involve about 16,000 men, and have caused serious interference with trade, in particular with ...”

“... that strand of blood’s history which winds most directly to the beginnings, in 1982, of the Aids crisis. His Part I, ‘Blood Magic’, thus takes the story quickly from magic and mystery to the early 20th-century achievements of Karl Landsteiner, who identified the ABO blood groups; Richard Lewisohn, who discovered that sodium citrate would keep blood from ...”

“... new powers to choke off such profligacy with higher interest rates. None of this is very new on an international scale. Welfare cuts, privatisation and financial austerity have become the small change of left-of-centre governments over the past 15 years. From the early Eighties, Western European socialist-led administrations – in France, Spain and ...”

“... of Marxism which is still relatively uncommon in our language. The intricacy of the current international discussion of various phases of his thought contrasts very sharply with the few relatively general impressions which most of us have been able to register, even through careful study of those more readily accessible works which are said to be his ...”

“... of the Soviet Union, when some State Department officials were urging that the US scale down its international involvement, Holbrooke led the charge for doubling down on US hegemony. The centrepiece of his career was the war in Bosnia in the early 1990s. The Western press, following Holbrooke’s own script, anointed him peacemaker of the Balkans, the man ...”

“... has turned to anger. Old Corruption is back. The country is in the grip of a food and power crisis. Inflation is approaching 15 per cent. The price of gas (used for cooking in many homes) has risen by 30 per cent and the price of wheat by more than 20 per cent since November 2007. Food and commodity prices are rising all over the world, but there is an ...”

“... violent frontier culture; in the legacies of slavery and the nativism that treated every immigrant group, beginning with the Irish, with fear and loathing, and in memories of the Civil War which were refreshed with every outbreak of class warfare. But it expressed, above all, how poorly prepared the country’s new business elite was to deal with the social ...”

“... is very far from won. Why haven’t the complete papers on the 1914 Curragh mutiny – when a group of British officers threatened to resign rather than impose Home Rule on Ulster by force – been made public? Or the papers on the Suez crisis, or on Rudolf Hess’s 1941 flight to Britain? Or on the royal family’s ...”

“... formed when the second Labour administration collapsed in the wake of the 1931 financial crisis was ‘national’ in name only. It was an example of the sinuous adaptability and capacity for reacting to circumstance that have made the Tories so effective at attaining and retaining power. There has been something called a Tory Party in England since ...”