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“... to Poland. In Deutscher’s words he ‘left Warsaw with the crystallised view that the Fourth International was a complete fiasco, that it was degenerating rapidly into an arid sect with which I did not want to be involved’. At its founding congress a few months earlier, the two Polish delegates, under the influence of Deutscher, had opposed the ...”

“... should have more sense. I add a couple of footnotes to what I suppose we should call the Falklands Crisis. The first is to do with the Labour Party. In recent years the Labour Party has handled the question of war with great embarrassment and delicacy. Officially it supports Nato. Officially it accepts nuclear weapons. But it does so with reluctance. It would ...”

“... was often, he believed, cover for ‘terror and intimidation’. By contrast, he insisted to a group of German industrialists in 1931 that ‘the capitalistic market economy is a democracy, in which every penny constitutes a vote.’ Elected by means of what he called a ‘consumer plebiscite’, the rich depended on the ‘will of the people as ...”

“... Moreover, the idea of Bush and Blair acting as global moral arbiters doesn’t travel well. The crisis in Darfur is political. It’s a civil war, and like all wars it needs a political settlement. Late in the night of 16 November Kofi Annan chaired a meeting at the African Union headquarters in Addis Ababa at which he, the AU and the UN Security Council ...”

“... That Gbagbo is somewhere between Mugabe to the south and Gaddafi to the north, in the eyes of the international community? Or that the international community’s latter-day mission to civilise Africa has led to its fighting a war in Libya and a successful battle in Ivory Coast, with a little help from France, the former ...”

“... it has a big say over what employers can offer. Both the RMT union and the Rail Delivery Group blamed the failure of negotiations before Christmas on the interference of the transport minister, Mark Harper. Public sector pay has increased at a lower rate than private sector pay almost every year since 2011. At the end of last year, private sector ...”

“... Scotland, remain wards of the state. The financial news service Bloomberg, drawing on work by the International Monetary Fund, estimates the US subsidy at $83 billion a year. Senators Sherrod Brown (Democrat, Ohio) and David Vitter (Republican, Louisiana) have asked Congress’s investigative arm, the Government Accountability Office, to come up with a more ...”

“... of ‘national socialism’. In order to avoid a return to such self-defeating strategies, the International Monetary and Financial Conference of the United and Associated Nations at Bretton Woods in 1944 agreed to restore stability with a new kind of gold standard, to recover prosperity by means of freed ...”

“... that the centre could hold. Fear of winding down? The prolonged humiliation of the Tehran hostage crisis, following so quickly the utter defeat of American purposes in Vietnam and experienced against the backdrop of apparently successful Soviet interventions in the Third World, signalled a stunning plunge from the apogee of world power. Fear of falling ...”

“... he had already been identified by the authorities as the person responsible for stirring up international opinion against the environmental degradation caused by the activities of Shell, and they were out to get him. Within days of his arrest, he was pronounced guilty by the psychopathic military administrator of Rivers State, Lt Col. Dauda Komo, who ...”

“... Party that he made his way up. The Ba’ath Party was an elaborately-structured ideological group organised in several Arab countries as a conspiracy against all existing governments, sometimes in alliance with the Communists but more usually in vicious opposition to them. Committed theoretically both to socialism and to the unity of the Arab ...”

“... at least in the industrial nations, are in a state of flux. According to some, the future of international economic co-operation and co-ordination may hang in the balance. It might still be worth asking, despite these uncertainties, whether the crash could have been predicted. Here, those who say yes may be on safer ground. There were plenty of reasons ...”

“... budget which will be $400 million less than its $1.4 billion peak in 1996. Perhaps this is why the international aid community has warmed to the North Korean crisis. But in the process, UN and private relief agencies have violated the generally accepted conventions of humanitarian response by pushing ahead without any ...”

“... For the institutions that claim to represent ‘the international community’ – the Western press, international NGOs and UN agencies – the armed conflict in the Democratic Republic of Congo has been a paradigm of senseless violence. The number of casualties is indeed staggering ...”

“... contract to restore second-tier oilfields in Iraq. He is a member of the politburo of the Carlyle Group, in which it is estimated he owns equity of $180 million – a sliver of their $17.5 billion portfolio. Baker’s mission, we now know, was less about debt-forgiveness than about cutting a deal for the Carlyle ...”