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“... Hailed as a ‘little Englander’ before the First World War, by 1920 he had become an ‘international man’. In the 1950s, A.J.P. Taylor retrospectively enlisted him as a member of CND, but a decade later he was being pulled in the opposite direction by the free marketeers of the Mont Pélérin Society in Europe and the Foundation for Economic ...”

“... planners (Rexford Tugwell) and social-welfare liberals (Harry Hopkins). This was the heterogeneous group that lay behind the American version of the welfare state. A flurry of legislation followed; dams and highways were built; electricity was brought to remote rural areas; there was regulation of finance capital; people were put to work maintaining parks and ...”

“... at 58 in London?’ Adonis Papaconstantinou, a businessman in Nicosia who is organising a campaign group of depositors who lost money in the bank crash, told me about a man who’d retired three months earlier, stashed his €350,000 pension fund in Laiki and lost a quarter of a million euros. ‘You’re talking about somebody who doesn’t know about ...”

“... at the Palace. Even the Cabinet war-council is cruising for some green relief, some planetary crisis to get them off the hook. Publishers have only to bring into focus all this universal, non-specific weather angst, then to feed it, fan it, explain it away. The resultant, glossy anthologies of climatic irregularities – acid rain, the Milankovitch ...”

“... How else can I take it if I don’t take it personally?’ ‘This is not an important crisis,’ he said. ‘It won’t alter the history of the world. We both knew it was coming. You would never keep me away from my people just as I would never keep you away from your books. We’ve had some good times together, maybe learned a little from each ...”

“... he plots are familiar – from patriarchy to performance in women’s studies, from interest-group pluralism to individualist rational choice theory in political science – the cumulative effect of reading the same story again and again across so many fields is arresting. When Ronald Reagan begins to sound like Judith Butler and right-wing evangelicals ...”

“... end up being, his 1500 pages turn with speed. Set pieces such as the 1963 Conservative leadership crisis, the 1966 World Cup final and the 1970 general election are extremely well done and exciting to read, even for those who remember who won. His treatment of major political figures is untypically nuanced: both Harold Macmillan and Harold Wilson escape the ...”

“... argument also snaps the point off the damaging question of Diego Garcia, raised, in this group of books, by the Latin American Bureau and by Anthony Barnett. If the kelpers were too few and boring to be rescued, what was wrong with throwing the population of Diego Garcia out of their homes to make way for an American air base? The Diego Garcians too ...”

“... cover as a journalist, where he landed his first and only scoop. In Seville, he walked into a group of German pilots flying for Franco – a story which rang round the world as the first solid proof of Nazi involvement. But in early 1937, Koestler’s luck ran out. Reporting from Malaga, he was captured when the city fell to the rebels and imprisoned as a ...”

“... people to pay a lot of money, and if someone didn’t pay they would be tortured.’ In 1993, a group of Pashtuns from the south and south-east, appalled by the actions of some of the former mujahideen, decided to restore some kind of order. The group coalesced around a reclusive mullah called Omar, a veteran fighter who ...”

“... It’s been​ four years since a group of US Navy Seals assassinated Osama bin Laden in a night raid on a high-walled compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan. The killing was the high point of Obama’s first term, and a major factor in his re-election. The White House still maintains that the mission was an all-American affair, and that the senior generals of Pakistan’s army and Inter-Services Intelligence agency (ISI) were not told of the raid in advance ...”

“... was rarely pronounced even among scientists before 2008 (a year also notable for a world economic crisis that caused global carbon emissions to fall for the first time since the dissolution of the USSR), when the Stratigraphy Commission of the Geological Society of London met to consider whether a new chapter in the history of the earth had opened, deserving ...”

“... is unlikely to resolve itself any time soon. This has the makings of a full-blown constitutional crisis that the Conservative Party, no matter who becomes its next leader, may struggle to contain. No Conservative leader, least of all one as essentially pragmatic as Cameron, would open the door to such a possibility lightly.Prime among Cameron’s reasons for ...”

“... in Tehran the Iranians have had ample time to consider the virtues of Islamic government and international isolation. Looking beyond their borders, they contemplate ‘emirates of rubble’ in Iraq and Afghanistan and count themselves lucky. Since the death of Ayatollah Khomeini in 1989, the ‘Terrorists’ (in the French-Revolutionary rather than the ...”