“... 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 ...”

“... West Germany’s half-apologetic victory in 1954, for example, was a decisive affirmation of its international rehabilitation, and unified Germany’s tournament in 2006 – the Sommermärchen – was its first major sporting event since the 1936 Olympics, with the schwarz-rot-gold flag newly ubiquitous. A World Cup qualifier in 1969 ignited political ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... stabilisation plan on which the IMF insisted as a condition of bailing Turkey out of its financial crisis – a standard deflationary package that had run into stiff trade-union opposition. When the military seized power, they retained his services, and once popular resistance was crushed, Özal’s hands were no longer tied. He could now implement the ...”

“... 1920, he co-founded the French Communist Party, and in 1923 went as its delegate to the Communist International in Moscow. In late 1924 he was sent to the Comintern headquarters for Asia in Canton. In and out of Chinese and British jails, he steadily built up a corps of like-minded Vietnamese, one a history teacher fascinated by Napoleon, Vo Nguyen Giap. In ...”

“... liberals pressed forward to touch the hem of his coat. ‘It is so essential for us to oppose the group-think which causes us to feel we live in a security state,’ he said, and Kucinich is certainly a kind of answer: he advocates teach-ins, talks about ‘the degradation of our Constitution’, and has the heart to spell out the lies and bunglings of the ...”

“... made the mistake of handing the construction of a national health system to his wife and a group of advisers she consulted in private. Obama, to avoid that error, left the framing and elaboration of a bill to five committees of Congress: an experiment in dissociation that rendered him blameless but also clueless beyond the broadest of rhetorical ...”