“... an element of exaggeration – was not inaccurate as a gauge of its general dominance.The international conjuncture formed a highly favourable environment for this turn: the global ascendancy of Anglo-American neo-liberalism offered a formidable backdrop to the French scene. But no other Western country saw quite so decisive an intellectual ...”

“... Anne Applebaum’s book begins with one group of women in the Polish city of Lodz and ends with another. The 45 years between the end of the Second World War and the emergence of a free, non-communist Poland separate them. But the younger women have decided to start again at the point where their elders left off – and to avoid their mistakes ...”

“... they were likely to be thwarted.The speaker was Nicole Phillips, a lawyer for an American advocacy group called the Haitian Bridge Alliance. She wore a baseball cap and an aid-worker apron with the Kreyòl translation of ‘Many hands make light work’ printed on it. Gaining entry at the US’s southwest border has become incredibly complicated. Each of the ...”

“... passed in less than two minutes. I was watching with a journalist from France 24, the state’s international television network, who gave a derisive shrug. But 280,000 gilets jaunes were out across France, creating go-slows at roundabouts, motorway tolls and intersections. It was a triumph; they were ready for more. On their Facebook pages they began ...”

“... within Western musical structures. He had cultural reservations too. He played at the Monterey International Pop Festival in 1967, but he wasn’t in sympathy with the summer of love. His music was mind-expanding enough, he thought; there was no need to be stoned to appreciate it. Instruments were sacred objects and he was distressed by the onstage ...”

“... in 1947, proposing a ‘theatre workshop’ for every new town, conducting his own exercises in international relations by befriending the Behan family in Dublin. He began a lifelong skirmish with the BBC over its deference to the British intelligence services, its deracinated styles of presentation and its emasculation of folk culture. ‘On the lips of ...”

“... literary abilities were not often celebrated. He was the property of economists – a brilliant crisis economist, as I think of him, which is one reason why we hear so much about him today. But if Bloomsbury seemed out of fashion, the Fabians were moving out of sight. Though none of us knew it in 1960, the Bloomsbury ...”

“... Perhaps, the Schloss-propagandists suggested, it could become something like the Louvre.In 1993, a group of private citizens raised money to put up an enormous scaffold hung with printed plates replicating the Baroque façade. The trompe l’oeil wasn’t intended to demonstrate the beauty of Schlüter’s design (which was well known), but to convince ...”

“... only gets a couple of pages); it is concerned not with the ramifications of one man’s mid-life crisis but the grand themes of love, war, globalisation and history. Nonetheless, it is still distinguished by Lanchester’s trademark humour, intelligence and taste for facts. The principal narrator is Tom Stewart, responsible for a full half of the novel (the ...”

“... win.) He was subjected to relentless attacks on his character in the local and national media. A group of young men, who for some reason were wearing dresses, splashed ammonia on him before a press conference. On my first night in Sochi, Nemtsov and the former chess champion turned oppositionist Garry Kasparov, who was helping him on the campaign ...”

“... that enable them to buy second homes. And there is still resistance. Between 1979 and the 1990s a group called Meibion Glyndŵr – the ‘sons’ of Owain Glyndŵr, who fought back English armies in the 15th century – participated in a campaign that resulted in the burning down of around two hundred holiday homes. Their actions echoed what happened in ...”

“... owns Mini and Rolls-Royce, Volkswagen owns Bentley, while the MG is owned by Nanjing Automobile Group of China – which might be one of the things that explains a degree of loose wiring in the English nationalist brain. In any event, when it comes to cars, the country is secretly obsessed with its supposed manufacturing prowess, and it is no mistake that ...”

“... hundreds of Greek city-states and ranks them according to various criteria, including size, fame, international activity and public building, as well as the prevalence of their currencies in the coin hoards of the time (on the reasonable assumption that if people wanted to hold its coins, your state must have had a pretty solid reputation). On all ...”

“... Democrats from patients incapable of giving meaningful assent, and this plunges him into a crisis of faith in democracy, communism and even the practical possibility of politics.Amerigo is a character primed for crisis: The Watcher is a text of sincere communist disillusionment as well as an unsparing satire of ...”

“... The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, 1947-1949. He is a leading member of the group of ‘new’ or revisionist Israeli historians who, by challenging the conventional Zionist version of how the state of Israel came into existence, have sparked a debate which shows no sign of subsiding. The performance of the pre-state intelligence ...”