“... appeared on TV, trying to look like the sort of leader who wants it understood that the political crisis is to be discussed with gravity and sangfroid. Instead, he came across as a dumbed down dictator fearful for his own political future. His performance as he broadcast to the nation, first in Urdu and then in English, was incoherent. The gist was simple: he ...”

“... so high, even in that era of mass unemployment, that a question was asked in Parliament about the crisis in Cradley Heath. My father had never seen anything like it, and it terrified him. This industrial slum on the further outskirts of Birmingham was beyond his comprehension. At Colley Lane School, he lost control of his class. The children never stopped ...”

“... agricultural workers dropped by more than 25 per cent, with the highest losses in the youngest age group. However, life for those who remained improved somewhat, thanks to falling consumer prices and the smaller size of families, ‘as contraceptive techniques became more widely known’. More country people could now afford to eat butter! Women’s ...”

“... Vice-Chancellor of Reading University from 1950 to 1963) he seemed destined, towards the world of international journalism. The first was Neal Ascherson, two years ahead of him at Eton, a formidable intelligence, who went to Cambridge and subsequently became a distinguished reporter on Eastern European affairs and an influential left-wing thinker. The second ...”

“... receded from view until the dramas of the Six Day War in 1967, the next war in 1973, and the oil crisis. This had a direct impact on British politics, leading to Harold Wilson’s return to Downing Street in 1974. He resigned two years later in a miasma of dark suspicion, not much brightened by his resignation honours list, with its bizarre collection of ...”

“... at Antietam, Gladstone and the foreign secretary, Lord John Russell, agreed that a humanitarian crisis was at hand in America; Gladstone feared one in Lancashire as well, among the cotton mill workers. He called for an end to the war through arbitration, declaring that the Confederates ‘have made a nation’. Charles Francis Adams shuddered, conceding ...”

“... Vanessa the unwelcome opportunity to see whether she was right. Sue ‘rose to the occasion of a crisis, as she always does,’ Julian told his mother, ‘and was very superb – it’s a pity furious women attract me so much. And so completely charming.’ He resigned; she turned down his offer of marriage. Bell didn’t leave China until early ...”

“... of the Young Turks of 1908, a complete nonsense. ‘I do not think it is easy to exaggerate the international power of the Jews,’ the Foreign Office Under-Secretary Lord Robert Cecil said. Segev quotes a character in The Thirty-Nine Steps airing the common prejudice that ‘the Jew is everywhere . . . He’s the man who is ruling the world just ...”

“... car’) and how much her daughter depended on her (‘Janet also stepped in when a particular group bored Jackie, as did the coffee hour at the White House for the wives of the New York Stock Exchange members or the social for the International Council of Women’), but Pottker’s most telling sentence concerns that ...”

“... 1936, Weil crossed the Spanish border and made her way to Barcelona. There she managed to join a group of international volunteers in the small town of Pina de Ebro. Noticing her short-sightedness, her comrades at first refused to give her a weapon. But she demanded so vociferously to be allowed to carry a rifle like ...”

“... project into a world that has moved on, a world of individual rights, open frontiers, and international law. The very idea of a ‘Jewish state’ – a state in which Jews and the Jewish religion have exclusive privileges from which non-Jewish citizens are for ever excluded – is rooted in another time and place. Israel, in short, is an ...”

“... men to desertions and purges. Thanks to sanctions provoked by the continuing US Embassy hostage crisis, and the new republic’s brittle relations with most countries, the Army’s access to Western-made parts and arms had been severely curtailed. (The Soviet Union imposed an arms embargo on both belligerents.) Logistically, Iran was caught unawares; it ...”

“... published a sequel, O lulismo em crise: Um quebra-cabeça do período Dilma, 2011-16 (‘Lulism in Crisis: A Puzzle of the Dilma Period’), which – even if there is little sign of it yet – one may hope will meet less silence.2 From time to time, in different countries, books are compared to Marx’s Eighteenth Brumaire, but as a dazzling synthesis of ...”

“... the principal organiser of the action was imprisoned, then tortured to death.Some months later, a group of ultra-conservative Muslim notables in Srinagar sent a memorandum to the British Viceroy, Lord Reading, protesting the brutality and repression:Military was sent for and most inhuman treatment was meted out to the poor, helpless, unarmed, peace-loving ...”

“... a semi-official Nato anniversary conference organised by Washington’s Centre for Strategic and International Studies, and held with some formality at the Palais d’Enghien in Brussels, he was accompanied by a handsome blonde with unspecified duties on the state-owned ENI or possibly the Socialist Party of Italy payroll; a brunette with unspecified duties ...”