“... have been destroyed, and victims’ medical records lost or falsified. When in the early 1990s a group of HIV-positive victims agreed to settle a case they’d brought against the government in exchange for ex-gratia payments, they had to sign away their right to sue again over any related medical problem, though officials knew what most of the litigants ...”

“... but in 1935 he went to Moscow. A year later, he resurfaced in Spain as commander of the 11th International Brigade (he is the model for Hemingway’s General Hans in For Whom the Bell Tolls). He was also, according to information received by MI5, the ‘leader of the OGPU’ – one of the KGB’s predecessors – ‘in Madrid’. In 1939, this ...”

“... by not being proletarians. In 1959 Althusser took more decisive action. He brought together a group of philosophers, in the Salle des Actes of the Ecole Normale, and proposed a collective work on Marx. His project was for a long and exhaustive analysis of the principal Marxist texts, an analysis which would be both philosophical and linguistic. To his ...”

“... new job as chief of German diplomacy has a certain piquancy: the diplomatic hypocrisies of ‘the international community’ are not his natural idiom. But he is a learner. Under Fischer’s guidance, the Greens, impervious to criticism from the left of the SPD, have welcomed the expansion of Nato to Russia’s borders. Fischer’s career can be seen as in ...”

“... de Libertação de Angola (FNLA), whose base lay further north, among the Bakongo, an ethnic group on either side of Angola’s border with Zaire. The MPLA was an orthodox Marxist-Leninist movement, under Soviet patronage, with an ideology that claimed to do away with racial differences: the fact remained, however, that a disproportionate number of its ...”

“... in 2009, as did stamps or coins in at least ten other countries.Darwin had an anniversary Facebook group dedicated to him: its goal was to have 200,000 unique Happy Birthdays posted by 12 February and a million ‘friends’ by the November anniversary of the Origin. The group also planned a mass ‘Happy ...”

“... for nearly fifty years. By then it had no parallel anywhere in the world. Its origins lay in the crisis of the Ch’ing Empire in the mid-19th century, when the Taiping Rebellion gave a Western coalition, led by Britain, the chance to force a ‘Treaty system’ on the beleaguered dynasty, subjecting China to full commercial penetration. The immediate ...”

“... between Syria and Iraq were running very high, and sticking to his conviction that times of crisis are opportunities for the bold (as they had been in 1948), Ben-Gurion argued that this was ‘the time to arouse Lebanon – that is to say, the Maronites – to proclaim a Christian state’. He later said: Maybe (of course nothing is certain in ...”

“... own CW … Al-Nusrah Front’s relative freedom of operation within Syria leads us to assess the group’s CW aspirations will be difficult to disrupt in the future.’ The paper drew on classified intelligence from numerous agencies: ‘Turkey and Saudi-based chemical facilitators,’ it said, ‘were attempting to obtain sarin precursors in bulk, tens of ...”

“... the centre of anyone’s historical consciousness. It was in that month a culture very deeply in crisis and threatened with possible discontinuation: more than for most reasons because the Europeanisation of Great Britain had deprived it of its economic (and like it or not, its previous spiritual) raison d’être, and it had not yet found another. Not ...”

“... years, after a man called Ali Lameda got stuck in one for a few years and later told Amnesty International about it. Who doubted their existence in the first place? After Stalin, who would expect anything different from a Communist regime? Some courageous human rights activists managed to penetrate the appalling political prisons run by the South Korean ...”

“... to copy the finished article. This worked well for people who couldn’t follow the spoken word, a group which often included the ones with the best literary taste; the people who could very nearly follow this talk, with which I kept myself interested while I approached the summary statement on the blackboard, found it very trying. I remember a very able ...”

“... learned what the other had been doing.’ Armand proposed to integrate forty members of Claude’s group into the MUR; Claude’s Party handlers congratulated him; he felt as if he’d been awarded ‘the Order of Lenin’. But the Party double-crossed his father. When the MUR weapons were delivered, the Party told Claude and his men to grab as many guns as ...”

“... in less happy lands.Hoover liked to say that he began his ‘extensive and penetrating study’ of international communism just after the First World War, when he was put in charge of the ‘radical division’ of the Justice Department. He spent his whole life in Washington – his family had lived there for generations – and never seems to have doubted ...”

“... Blackhawk, Estes bears the marks of the political radicalisation brought by the 2008 financial crisis and the Dakota Access Pipeline protests of 2016-17, which attempted to block the construction of an oil pipeline traversing the Standing Rock Reservation. In Our History Is the Future, Estes balances a political polemic with an account of Native resistance ...”