“... at Birmingham’s National Exhibition Centre, a cavernous space tacked onto the city’s international airport. The ‘momentous event’ had many familiar trappings: a busy fringe programme, a smattering of business sponsors, ambitious young men in sharp suits. But it also felt different from any party conference I’d attended before. The queue ...”

“... Greek mythology. All the things I read as a boy.’ Now he’s thinking of leaving. The financial crisis hasn’t affected hospital supplies, he says, apart from occasional blips with stationery. But his wages have been cut by 30 per cent. His basic salary, with 22 years’ experience, is €1350 a month, rising to a maximum of €3000 a month with ...”

“... a fact which merely reinforced its hard line and bad habits. In any case, the same old leadership group hung on and on and on in the approved gerontocratic fashion – Slovo, Goldberg and Wolpe were prominent names in the SACP of 1961 and still are in 1991 – and this extraordinary continuity was enhanced by the powerful kinship networks which knit the Party ...”

“... as a financial centre, but if you include the offshore zones it’s estimated that a third of all international deposits and investments flow through Britain and its satellites. Moreover, according to the Financial Conduct Authority, most UK banks don’t enforce know-your-customer rules: the financial capital of the world doesn’t ask too many questions ...”

“... The most renowned historian of his time. Fernand Braudel owed his international reputation to the two great volumes on the Mediterranean in the age of Philip II which he published in 1949, and to his trilogy on the material civilisation of world capitalism, which appeared between 1967 and 1979. He died a few months before the first volumes of his incomplete final work came out in 1986 ...”

“... to exercise the other side of his political personality. In Florida he met in private with a group of state Democratic leaders who he felt had been lukewarm in getting behind the campaign. ‘This boy Kennedy is going to win and he’s going to win big,’ he told them. ‘And if he wins without the South, I’m warning you – I’m warning you – you ...”

“... Treitschke with the tongue of Foucault’. Even the austere European Journal of International Law thought it ‘read like a thriller’.Signal amid this enthusiasm has been a lack of curiosity about the author himself. To understand The Passage to Europe, however, a sense of where van Middelaar comes from is required. Born in 1973 in ...”

“... institutions sticking to the tenets of Islam, they announced, were largely immune from the debt crisis. Devout Muslims may lend and borrow under certain conditions; they can even buy and sell debt in the form of ‘Islamic’ bonds, but most other kinds of debt trading are frowned on. Al Rajhi Bank, based in Saudi Arabia, and the Kuwait Finance House posted ...”

“... interests. It should also finally be understood that nuclear parity and a stable architecture of international relations cannot prevent war. Only mass political participation and personal responsibility can truly put an end to this war. This is what those who, against all odds, take part in anti-war protests in Russia are trying to convey to the ...”

“... a Festival of Britain manqué – to reveal that such self-confidence has dissolved. Our ‘crisis’ of national identity has become an old friend. It’s 25 years since Tom Nairn first willed the ‘Break-Up of Britain’, and ten since Linda Colley influentially explained that Britons were the product of particular historical conditions ...”

“... All these accounts have a grain of truth, but none captures the full dimensions of America’s crisis, which is not merely political but spiritual, the latest chapter in an older struggle over what sort of country it wants to be – if, indeed, it still is a single country.One of the more hallucinatory reactions to Trumpism during the first term came from ...”

“... of peaceful, prosperous coexistence would be clear to all. That the British Department for International Development suddenly decided as late as the third week of March 2003 that it needed to commission a ‘literature review’ on the nature and working of government in Iraq suggests a growing suspicion that there might be more to the regime than the ...”

“... fittings with table-tennis balls fixed underneath’ – but thousands were, and Adamski became an international sensation. His book Flying Saucers Have Landed (1953), co-authored with the Anglo-Irish aristocrat and Spitfire pilot Desmond Leslie, went through eleven printings in two years, and he was soon a regular presence on radio and TV. In 1959, he ...”

“... and Islamic State. The so-called moderates had evaporated and the Free Syrian Army was a rump group stationed at an airbase in Turkey.’ The assessment was bleak: there was no viable ‘moderate’ opposition to Assad, and the US was arming extremists. Lieutenant General Michael Flynn, director of the DIA between 2012 and 2014, confirmed that his agency ...”

“... Suddenly Hussein’s honour – if not his political survival – depended on saving Mishal. The crisis offered Hussein a chance to settle scores with Netanyahu, who had treated him with undisguised contempt, and whom he suspected of seeking to ‘destroy all I have worked to build between our peoples’, as Hussein had written to Netanyahu in ...”