“... 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 ...”

“... Assembly, where he justified the concept of excess profits, was a turning point in the history of international property rights. Washington decided that its tolerance of Third World economic nationalism had gone on long enough. Chile’s nationalisations, Nixon’s Treasury secretary, John Connally, said, threatened to provoke a ‘snowballing’ of similar ...”

“... Hitler and National Socialism from the very first moment. They were not part of any resistance group; they did nothing ‘active’ to damage the Nazi dictatorship. They simply refused to let this dirty, vulgar, evil thing across the threshold until, in the final stages of the war, it broke in and took their sons and their father away to defend the ...”

“... ongoing, cumulative warming effect. In 2001, the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a group of 2500 scientists, predicted an additional increase during the 21st century of between 1.4 and 5.8°C. In October, a body of nearly 300 scientists completed the Arctic Climate Impact Assessment, a report based not on worst-case scenarios but on observed ...”

“... a name devised in a journalistic stunt, given that he was the first criminal to become a figure of international mythology thanks to the global print media. Journalists were no more crude or excitable in this case than they had been before and had no need to exaggerate the gore; the mutilations were horrific and related news stories often shockingly ...”

“... was directed not only against the Soviets but also against revisionists closer to home, notably a group of young US scholars, mainly social historians with a special interest in labour history, who from the 1970s objected to the characterisation of the October Revolution as a ‘coup’ and argued that in the crucial months of 1917, from June to October, the ...”

“... swung wildly, the urban areas in particular grew increasingly angry. My father, who works for an international organisation in Harare, said riots were predicted before the end of the rainy season. The rainy season ends in April. The city didn’t even make it close.*Zimbabwe’s currency is a fairground ride: but the kind of unhinged fairground ride that ...”

“... gates against what they rightly saw as the threat of Athenian aggression. In the middle of this crisis the official state galley arrived from Athens, requesting Alcibiades’ immediate return home to stand trial. In order to avoid trouble from troops loyal to him, the galley’s commander unwisely allowed Alcibiades to make the voyage in his own ...”

“... the climax of her first novel, Our Lady of the Nile (2012), which weaves the personal dramas of a group of schoolgirls into a narrative about the disintegration of postcolonial Rwanda. The novel is set in the Lycée Notre-Dame du Nil, a fictionalised version of her own school. The boarders there are the daughters of ‘ministers, high-ranking army ...”

“... more than a smattering of acclaim and a measure of derision. Two years later, in another moment of international prestige for France, Aimé Jacquet’s squad lifted the World Cup. The team was fêted as a mixed-race triumph under the acronym BBB – Black, Blanc, Beur (second-generation French immigrants from North Africa). By then, however, the original ...”

“... All around her, businessmen are avidly taking newspapers, so Selin takes one, too.From the International Herald Tribune, I learned that a ninety-five-hundred-pound elephant called Kika had been artificially inseminated in Berlin. The sperm had been taken from two male elephants and there was no way of knowing for certain which was the real father, but ...”

“... actually a porter at University College Hospital. His mother, Faouzia, was involved in the sewing group at the Westway Trust. ‘She sat by the window,’ a colleague said, ‘dropping a stitch when she saw something funny outside.’ R.D.’s family were from Casablanca and the El Wahabis from Larache.‘One time,’ R.D. said, ‘Yasin broke his foot. He ...”

“... a vivid impression of the precocious, iconoclastic schoolboy and student, centre of a devoted group of friends, a great party-giver and party-goer, famous for singing his own cabaret songs to the guitar; already influenced by Wedekind, Büchner and Rimbaud, he thought at 18 that he wrote better. Much of this account is new to English readers, who will at ...”