“... 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 ...”

“... praise. His own publishing house – the Middle East’s largest, the Saudi Research and Marketing Group – struck a deal with international media outlets, including Bloomberg, to amplify his narrative. For the prince the flattery was seductive. Mohammad is said to like his courtiers to call him Iskander, Arabic for ...”

“... Bukele came to power in El Salvador, and that November, the Bolivian right seized on an electoral crisis and ousted Evo Morales. In Peru, after the leftist Pedro Castillo narrowly won the presidency in 2021, right-wing forces in Congress paralysed his government and eighteen months later, after his failed attempt to dissolve the parliament, booted him out of ...”

“... After such injury, what forgiveness?’ Cabrera refuses to criticise any aspect of a West in crisis, and he dismisses brutal rightwing dictatorships as merely ‘inept’ – his word for Videla’s Argentina. Batista’s Cuba, of course, enjoyed a flourishing economy in which racism was non-existent. (Is Cabrera unaware that the mulatto President ...”

“... is ‘shrewed’ (not, one assumes, a chauvinistic allusion to his wife) on page 209, the Regency crisis of 1788 is in part ‘a constitutional problem with gave implications’ (page 339), page 286 tells us twice in three lines that William Ogilvie was a Scotsman; Whitley Stokes is ‘thanked for his answer to Paine by the board of Trinity College’ on page ...”

“... More​ than a million migrants crossed the Mediterranean during the refugee crisis of 2015, with about 850,000 landing in Greece and the remainder in Italy. By March 2016 the EU had signed an agreement with Turkey: Ankara would do its best to ensure that the refugees (mostly Syrian) pushing up into Turkey would remain there, while the EU would send refugees arriving in Greece (mostly but not all Syrian) back to Turkey ...”

“... change. Parr isn’t an ex-servicewoman or a professional military historian, but a lecturer in international relations at Keele University, ‘not accustomed to a military mindset’, as she puts it. Yet by the end of her book, much of this critical distance has disappeared, and Parr describes the Paras as ‘the finest regiment on earth’. It was founded ...”

“... prey; survival depends on stealth. Luo Ji is appointed by the UN as one of the Wallfacers, a small group of individuals charged with formulating plans to combat the Trisolarans. They are called Wallfacers after a Buddhist meditation technique that involves staring in silence at a wall, because in order to evade the sophons they work alone and don’t have to ...”

“... breakdowns and depressions, are twice as prone to suicide as married men. But the most cheerful group of women, the least prone to mental problems, are the never-married. This is of course not the view promoted in the media (past or present), which have been quick to apply to the unmarried or not yet married woman (as to the divorced or widowed female) the ...”

“... any other country. French literature, in the days of Sartre, Camus and De Beauvoir, enjoyed an international readership probably without equal in the postwar world, well beyond its standing between the wars. So when De Gaulle came to power, on the back of military revolt in Algiers, the dilapidated estate he inherited in fact offered solid bases for ...”

“... demographers and business people believe it is, especially in the US, where one migrant group after another – Jews, Poles, Italians, Irish – has auditioned for a role in the great musical of American identity. The competition has been bitter, especially between newcomers and predecessors, and the typecasting has been crude, yet sooner or later ...”

“... Moon. But the corpses of thousands of the poor were collected every year from the pavements of the International Settlement. Today beggars approach you discreetly on the Bund, Shanghai’s embanked riverfront, whose grand buildings once housed the banks, trading houses and diplomatic missions of China’s foreign overlords. The destitute are more invisible ...”

“... Day, the blockbuster sci-fi movie from 1996. Pullman, playing the US president, is rallying a group of pilots about to launch a jet fighter attack on one of the gigantic alien spacecraft that have been attacking Earth. It happens to be 4 July. He ends his speech on behalf of humankind, with the music swelling: ‘Today, we celebrate our independence ...”