“... of the term suddenly soared in the late 1990s, multiplying sixty times over and becoming, as John Gillingham, an economic historian attached to its earlier sense, remarked, ‘the current euphemism for overthrowing foreign governments’.Yet the relevance of its original meaning remains. Neoliberalism has not gone away. Its hallmarks are now ...”

“... Armenian breakaway from contested Nagorno-Karabakh) have their origins in ethnic rebellions that took place as the Soviet Union broke up. Almost all of them survive only because of Russian military protection against their vengeful neighbours.All have tiny populations, and some have less convincing claims to statehood than others. Abkhazia refused to become ...”

“... Yet he, too, makes of the poet what the title of one of his book’s most appreciative reviews, John Carey’s, called ‘The Hollow Man’. Moreover this is not, in Ackroyd’s case, a mere technicality, an unfortunate function of the concept of biography as necessarily external. His Life firmly presents Eliot as characterised by an essential emptiness at ...”

“... special interests and ignorance. Hence, on the one hand, the adventures of people like North, John Poindexter, Dennis Ross, Howard Teicher and Michael Ledeen, and, on the other hand, the amazing pudeur of the Secretary of State, whose position on Irangate matters, according to the Tower Report, was one of complete detachment. Representative Tom Lantos of ...”

“... and the operations of imperial oil, inevitably stoked a strong nationalist reaction. By 1958, John Foster Dulles reluctantly acknowledged the limits of Big Oil geo-strategy, conceding that nationalism ‘made it more difficult for the oil companies to maintain a decent position’. Mosadeq in Iran, Abdul Karim Qasim in Iraq, Pérez Alfonso in Venezuela ...”

“... on her lap. At a gathering of British psychoanalysts, students and academics organised by John Forrester in the 1980s the French psychoanalyst Jean Laplanche asked why there are no artistic representations of the erotic pleasure a mother gains in breastfeeding her child. Behind that question was another one. Why does the psychoanalytic representation ...”

“... remarking that his ‘vocabulary and syntax are those of utmost abstention from waste’. John Updike referred to ‘the stirring purity’ of Kafka’s prose. Hannah Arendt, as well, wrote that his work ‘speaks the purest German prose of the century’. So although Kafka was certainly Czech, it seems that fact is superseded by his written ...”

“... for the labours of its president, Giscard d’Estaing, assisted by a British factotum, John Kerr, the two real authors of the draft, their presence was of no consequence. The future charter of Europe was written for the establishments of the West, the governments of the existing 15 member states who had to approve it, relegating the countries of ...”

“... be not merely a dilettante but an enemy of the new institutional order. As far as I know, Forster took no notice. His attitude to these innovations would probably have resembled his view of motor cars in Howards End – destructive, smelly and intrusive, and associated with the kind of people he felt little need to know. Moreover there was a question ...”

“... that the biographical connection between his work on witchcraft and the persecution of the Jews took him some time to realise. Since then, Jewish concerns have recurred in many of his essays. But negationism of this particular genocide – others, as Armenians have reason to know, have fared differently – is so negligible a phenomenon in the West that it ...”

“... Framing the matter like this isn’t to accept as proven the ‘impossibility theorem’ of John Bellamy Foster, according to which there can be no ecologically sound capitalism. Nor is it to take it for granted that the next mode of production (and pollution) will necessarily be greener than that of the Soviet bloc, where the USSR drained away the Aral ...”

“... 28th member of the EU in 2013. Although it acceded later than Bulgaria and Romania, the government took great pride in getting there before Serbia. Most Brexit-related articles in the Croatian press refer to Croatia’s alleged concern about what will happen to Croatian citizens living in the UK. This is something of a joke. The Croatian political ...”

“... vides was published in 1974, which is late for the scholarship pupil plot in Britain and Ireland. John McGahern, Edna O’Brien, Richard Hoggart, Raymond Williams: they were all born between the end of the First World War and the early 1930s, and published their stories of class alienation in the late 1950s and early 1960s. It’s a bit late, too, for the ...”