“... instinctively towards the fullest possible alignment with the West. The small liberal-conservative group she joined late in 1989, Democratic Awakening, soon merged with the Alliance for Germany, an electoral coalition of centre-right parties led by the GDR wing of the Christian Democratic Union, the party of the West German chancellor, Helmut Kohl. Merkel ...”

“... their money; a Macedonian soldier had been offered 6000 DM – roughly 2.8 to the pound – by a group of refugees in the field to let them through the security cordon. But the most painful contradiction of Blace was the one you find everywhere in emergencies: the agonising pace at which the situation worsened for the refugees – tens of thousands treading ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... in the mid-1970s, Russophobia had been dormant since the near cataclysm of the Cuban Missile Crisis, but it returned in the shadow of the Vietnam debacle and started to spread in the late 1970s. It receded briefly during the Reagan-Gorbachev rapprochement and the crumbling of communism but resurged in the late 1990s, in tandem with the eastward march of ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... than Cromwell’ played well with them. But James was prone to ominous forebodings, and when the crisis came his courage deserted him. On 18 December he allowed himself to be shuffled off to Rochester by a band of Dutch guards, leaving William to take over his palaces and prerogatives at the head of a foreign army. Crowds filled the streets, as they had ...”

“... my lifetime has had such an invasive and lowering personal effect – in memory, the Cuban Missile Crisis came and went almost before you could say ‘Armageddon’. The visionary glint in the victors’ eyes just adds to our losers’ despair. ‘After 43 years, we have pushed the door ajar,’ the Tory MEP Daniel Hannan writes dreamily. ‘A rectangle of ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”