“... remarkable. Nobody wants to be left out of anything. Nearly two years ago the M-19, a subversive group which might be said to represent magical realism in politics, kidnapped the Conservative politician Alvaro Gomez. The action was conceived as a blow against the ‘oligarchy’ which would somehow result in the fusion of the guerrillas and the Armed Forces ...”

“... the killings. Two years later, five supporters of the National Socialist Underground (NSU), as the group called itself, appeared in court. By then it had become clear that various Verfassungsschutz agencies and informers had been in contact with the NSU but had failed to inform the police, which might have stopped the killings. There are lingering questions ...”

“... relief by the sight of Odenigbo’s home, where his revolutionary speeches, often recited to a group of sympathetic intellectuals, are burnished by the scholarly authority embodied in his large library with its high, ‘piercingly white’ ceilings and what Ugwu sees as its ‘alien furniture’. Both of these novels reject the ‘single story’ of Africa ...”

“... to be an invention of David Peterley’s, and who is now recognised as Australia’s first poet of international significance) may be checked against a long manuscript in the Mitchell Library at Sydney – by Richard Pennington. Gwen Ffrangcon-Davies did take the part of Etain in Rutland Boughton’s opera, The Immortal Hour in 1922, with Peter Shelving’s ...”

“... claimed Birmingham was a ‘no-go zone’ for non-Muslims, and that Birmingham’s schools were in crisis, especially Park View. Trustees resigned, staff resigned, others are still suspended pending disciplinary hearings. Pupils had cameras stuffed into their faces when they turned up to sit their GCSEs: results, which in 2013 had been excellent, dropped ...”

“... puzzling timidity culminated in his supine response to ‘deficit hawks’ during the debt ceiling crisis of the summer. Recently, Obama’s spine has begun to stiffen in response to the Occupy movement. He has finally started to make a populist critique of systemic inequality, but it remains to be seen how sustained or effective this new stance will ...”

“... of citoyen. All citizens were to have a say in government. But if everyone is to be included in a group, someone has first to decide who constitutes this group. And this necessarily implies that some are not members. The concept of the ‘citizen’, in other words, excludes every bit as much as it includes, and in the two ...”

“... the scene of a late-night car crash in Havana. He was arrested three months later at José Martí International Airport and sentenced to seven years in prison for manslaughter. According to the Serbian TV channel Insajder, the highest levels of the Serbian state lobbied the Cuban government for Radoman’s extradition – Montenegro doesn’t have an embassy ...”

“... will fail to meet the new settlement requirements. But they won’t solve Bulgaria’s demographic crisis: most won’t return home but will remain among the 2.5 million Bulgarians working abroad (3.5 million work at home). What their departure will mean for Britain – which faces labour shortages on its roads, in its fields, restaurants and hospitals ...”

“... has brought civilisation to its knees, and that Western society faces a total and debilitating crisis as a result of materialism, scientism, individualism and rationalism. Nothing less than the abandonment of Enlightenment thought and the wholesale reorientation of politics around constitutive norms of community can save us, they say. Asked, however, for ...”

“... satisfying and at times very insightful. The descriptions he gives of the rise and progress of the international student movement and of feminism are sober, if only moderately enthusiastic in tone, particularly when he has to keep reminding us that traditional labour – from steel workers to telephone operators – declined in importance, as did the ...”

“... In the spring of 1966, China seemed a stable, disciplined and united nation. It was led by a group of men whose comradeship had been forged by the Long March, by Japanese aggression and by civil war. They had made a revolution and then boldly undertaken to remake a society of 600 million people. Their instrument of rule and regeneration was arguably the ...”

“... to co-opt and attempts to coerce the unions. The third phase was marked by heightened economic crisis, rising unemployment, cuts in state welfare, rationalisation in private industry, cash limits in public employment. The scope for collaborative industrial relations was drastically reduced, and confrontation became a familiar feature of the trade-union ...”

“... a new, spectacular phase of Hong Kong’s struggle for democracy was about to unfold. We met at an international conference commemorating the thirtieth anniversary of the Tiananmen protest. Ten years ago, I received an invitation to a similar conference, to be held in Hong Kong. I told the organiser that the Hong Kong authorities were unlikely to welcome a ...”

“... great unsettling’ – is seen as the 16th century, which is when, he says, the profession of international diplomacy was born. A brief history is dashingly enacted, with details from Holbein’s The Ambassadors – the broken lute, that open Luther – and top tips from Ernest Satow’s Diplomatic Practice (1917): at a party, try dropping ‘something ...”