“... 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 ...”

“... guerrillas engaged in wars of anticolonial liberation.Under Kennedy a cabinet-level Special Group was set up to counter ‘subversive insurgency’. The deputy secretaries of defence and state, the heads of the CIA and the US Information Agency (USIA), the chair of the joint chiefs, the attorney general and Rostow were all ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... could be staged repeatedly, perhaps for ever.This terrifying vision originated among a small group of intellectuals whose belief system would have been deemed reckless even at the nadir of the Cold War – indeed, it was the worldview that consigned Barry Goldwater to crushing defeat by Lyndon Johnson in 1964. But eventually it moved inside the charmed ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... discover the most monumental and exhaustive analysis of his life and ideas in relation to Third International Leninism. It is probably the most important book yet to appear in the dissident-Communist perspective. Fortunately David Fernbach’s translation makes it accessible (apart from a few Volapük lapses like ‘genial’ for génial) and copes ruggedly ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... after 1990, he was one of the most famous activists in the world, who almost single-handedly drew international attention to one of the 20th century’s great environmental crimes: the destruction of the ancient primary rainforests of Sarawak in Borneo by logging companies owned by cronies of the Malaysian government. At the time, it was the most fashionable ...”

“... Corelli not only boasted the longest entry in Who’s Who, but had enjoyed commercial success and international celebrity on a scale unprecedented in literary history. Corelli occupied her Stratford home in a style commensurate with her sense of her artistic achievements. Her domestic regime was supported by a major-domo, two maids, a cook, a gardener, a ...”

“... flexible than its detractors care to admit. As Kapcia shows, there have been distinct cycles of crisis, debate and resolution, with relatively open discussion allowed in ruling circles. ‘Within the revolution, anything,’ was Fidel’s famous slogan, first articulated in the 1960s in regard to the role of intellectuals. This attitude fostered the ...”