“... of Ayatollah Khomeini in 1989, the ‘Terrorists’ (in the French-Revolutionary rather than the George-Bushian sense) have been losing ground in Iran. The Presidencies of Hashemi Rafsanjani were a slow-motion Thermidor. Since Muhammad Khatami was elected President in a landslide in 1997, Iran has stumbled towards accommodation, first with the Arab ...”

“... was rather far from the majority view of Castro’s 26 July Movement. When Guevara finally met the urban leaders of the movement, in the mountains in Cuba early in 1957, he was shocked by ‘the evident anti-Communist inclinations’ that prevailed among them. There was an angry exchange of letters at the end of that year between Guevara and René Ramos ...”

“... woes is its reliance on passenger fares for 72 per cent of its funding, after a deal between George Osborne and Johnson, towards the end of his stint as mayor, slashed its central funding by £700 million. The equivalent networks in Paris and New York rely on fares for only 38 per cent of their funding. Crossrail’s delays and spiralling capital costs ...”

“... practised a theatrical as well as an artistic bohemianism, and was drawn to the grimier aspects of urban life, cultivated in the rooms he rented as studios in working-class areas of London. No picnics for him. ‘Dirty, tumbledown Camden town, Charlie Peace, pubs and cabbage’, was Hugh Walpole’s description of Sickert’s studio when he visited in the ...”

“... of continued close relations with the Americans. In February the CIA honoured him with the George Tenet medal, in recognition of his ‘excellent intelligence performance in the domain of counterterrorism and his unbounded contribution to realise world security and peace’. On the night of 20 June, the eve of the Eid al-Fitr festival that ends the ...”

“... bedraggled little band constituted the first official English embassy to India. The flag of St George fluttered above their bivouac. The Ambassador was Sir Thomas Roe, a tough, intelligent, rather prickly man – a kind of blueprint for future administrators of British India. He had been in Mandu six months, grappling with exhaustion and acute ...”

“... away-from-home existence from the beginning, which even included a stint in the chorus of The George White Scandals before she started modelling, together with her later global wanderings, her war correspondent’s dangerous life, her many liaisons, foreign marriages, journalistic writings and multiform photographic accomplishments. Instead of copying her ...”

“... staggering performance’. Nehru himself, ‘in the hearts and minds of his countrymen’, is ‘George Washington, Lincoln, Roosevelt and Eisenhower rolled into one’.All countries have fond images of themselves, and big countries, inevitably, have bigger heads than others. Striking in this particular cornucopia of claims, however, is the standing of their ...”

“... for example, is funded by several of the Western embassies in the Balkans, two UN agencies, George Soros, the Organisation for Security and Co-Operation in Europe and the Swedish Helsinki Committee for Human Rights. Young people in Serbia who pin their colours to the mast of liberal democracy have something in common with the dissidents of the Cold War ...”

“... how their parents forgot them with vodka. Unlike the old Bolshevik elite, many of whom had been urban intellectuals, they were ‘Stalin’s children’ in the sense that Soviet education rescued them from ignorance (Gorbachev’s mother was illiterate), taught them loyalty to the ‘building of socialism’ and offered them careers. The family was ...”

“... the same view applies to Bolshevik terror-tactics and, according to a recent book on the Cheka by George Leggett, Carr understates by about 80 per cent the number of Cheka victims. His attitude on the nationalities question can almost be described as one of hatred. Lithuania’s ‘claim to independence’ rested on ‘precarious grounds’. The Ukrainians ...”

“... squad populism’, urging the murder of drug addicts as well as dealers in an effort to revive urban neighbourhoods. It is estimated that as many as thirty thousand people were killed, some by vigilante groups, in the space of six years. In Israel, the far right’s eliminationist rhetoric has provided the drumbeat to the genocidal violence meted out to ...”

“... exploring its symbolic and mythical dimensions, from the best-selling fiction of Elie Wiesel to George Steiner’s ruminations in In Bluebeard’s Castle and Richard Rubenstein’s The Cunning of History. But to insist on the uniqueness of the event is a short step to insisting on the exclusiveness of interpretation which asserts an empathetic privilege and ...”

“... begging soldiers, the smoke from the constant exhalation of sea-coal fires, the whole panoply of urban existence.’ This is his Lionel Bart tendency. The production numbers that animate his pitch, so that he can be a music hall turn as well as a scholarship boy. A fabulous exuberance and a chameleon respect, that has him becoming, or seeming to become, the ...”

“... of lives sunk in vice and degradation. These were the years when industrialisation created an urban culture that drew younger generations away from the land; and the more educated they became, the less they wanted the old way of life. The revolution of 1905, which led to the destruction of many estates by the marauding peasantry, eliminated any last ...”