“... those who suggest that it falls a long way below international terrorism of the al-Qaida variety, North Korea, the Israel/Palestine conflict, the Indo/Pakistan arms race, Southern Africa, international crime (including the drugs against which Mr Blair declared war before he did so on terrorism) and conservation of the environment. We are still involved in ...”

“... to Rio is called Lady Metroland. Her husband, Viscount Metroland, takes his ‘funny name’ (as Paul Pennyfeather sees it) from a fantasy fiefdom of the London Metropolitan Railway, an advertising man’s conceit which tickled the imagination of the public in the 1920s. Metroland was the commuter catchment area for the line running ...”

“... celebrated Micheaux’s successful reinvention and proposed the black settlement of the North-West. Micheaux followed Washington’s bootstraps philosophy and published and distributed The Conquest himself, embarking on an aggressive round of personal appearances in black communities. His second book, The Forged Note: A Romance of the Darker Races ...”

“... they were never going to be able to penetrate the narrow alleyways of the sprawling slums in the north and west of the city. In most cases they didn’t even try. Muqtada’s forces responded, as they have in the past when facing an attack in one place, by spreading the battle to Baghdad and every other city and town where their forces are strong. Local ...”

“... novel set in wartime Belfast; the second and third have as protagonists Irishmen in exile in North America; and the first tells the story of Diarmuid Devine, a teacher, who stayed behind in Belfast. ‘The climate of Northern Ireland ... is such as to encourage weakness of character,’ Moore wrote. The interesting thing about Devine was, compared to ...”

“... Sartre called ‘extreme situations’: the battlefields of the Second World War, the asylums of North Africa, clandestine anti-colonial work. Fanon was born in 1925 in Fort-de-France, the capital of Martinique, the fifth of eight children. His father, Félix, a customs inspector, was a descendant of free black cocoa farmers. His mother, Eléanoro, a ...”

“... know where they are. They’re in the area around Tikrit and Baghdad, and east, west, south and north, somewhat.’ I heard the US was building 14 ‘enduring bases’, capable of housing 110,000 soldiers, and I heard Brigadier-General Mark Kimmitt call them ‘a blueprint for how we could operate in the Middle East’. I heard that the US was building what ...”

“... split the civilian élites that had hitherto supported it, as many of the landed notables of the North-East – the core of its system of political alliances – defected to the opposition. The military held off the pressure from the streets, but at the cost of losing control of Congress, where a ‘liberal front’ of retrograde landowners and local ...”

“... light until dusk; 100 tons of bombs were dropped in a single day, but Neugass was still a long way north-east of Teruel with a ridge of mountains to cross. The Republican armies held their ground. Early in January, Colonel Rey d’Harcourt, Franco’s commanding officer in Teruel, surrendered the town to the government. By then Neugass, Barsky, the medics and ...”

“... Mbembe was told that he’d been accused of antisemitism. The festival is funded by the state of North Rhine-Westphalia, which – like most German states – has in recent years cancelled funding for organisations and individuals with ties to the pro-Palestinian BDS movement. Mbembe’s case made headlines. Even some of the more conservative German papers ...”

“... group had spent a couple of days in the Iraq Museum and then split into two units, one going north to Nineveh, Nimrud, Assur and Hatra, the other south to Babylon, Kish, Nippur, Uruk, Ur, Lagash. The Unesco team, however, was allowed only a limited stay in the country, was not permitted to go outside Baghdad, and its members had to live in tents in the ...”

“... especially outside Ireland, may wonder at the gap in sensibility between Heaney (born in 1939) and Paul Muldoon (born in 1951), but to read about Heaney’s first years, his ‘nineteen-fifties/Of iron stoves and kin groups still in place’, is to see that the two poets do come from different generations: ‘I was well and truly formed,’ Heaney says, ‘by ...”

“... as leader of the free world.The early years of US foreign policy were focused on dominating the North American landmass. Native populations were liquidated; vast territories were purchased from European states; border disputes were stitched up through legal manoeuvrings. The fledgling US state conducted a few experiments further afield. In 1821, a ...”

“... of Sea Power upon History (1890), we might stress the derring-do of the Royal Navy, or – as Paul Kennedy did recently – the role of public finance. Brewer concentrates on organisational factors, and isolates three that were crucial. First and foremost, Britain’s army and navy trebled in size in the century after the Glorious Revolution. By the ...”

“... satire on the town as the evil headquarters of imperial oppression, the icy giant of the North. ‘Naturally I despise my country from head to foot,’ wrote Pushkin, ‘but I am not going to let a foreigner get away with sharing that feeling.’ Here is how a Russian writes a poem about his own tyranny, he seems to say. ‘It was the best of ...”