“... well-meaning spectrum of helpers, from church groups and the Labour Party to the Communists and International Socialists. The Chileans mapped the discords of Unidad Popular fiercely onto our own local squabbles. A decade later, in 1987, I went back to Chile during the preparations for a plebiscite on the continuation of the military junta. I was joining my ...”

“... Lewis observes, has begun to shift on such questions. ‘As a global … organisation’, Amnesty International announced in 2015, we have ‘a responsibility to assess how best to prevent human-rights violations. As such, it is right and fitting that we should look at one of the most disadvantaged groups of people in the world, often forced to live outside ...”

“... for Hornsea One were made by a workforce that had already been laid off.I drove to the factory, a group of huge white sheds on the western side of the peninsula, the opposite side from Campbeltown. They lie among the old barracks and green security fencing of the former Machrihanish military airfield, at various times a nuclear weapons storage site, a US Navy ...”

“... in the long reign of Pitt the Younger; the madness of George III and the consequent Regency Crisis; the premonition of war and the actual wars with revolutionary France and then with Napoleon. But when you read about his career step by step you realise how little his perspective ever widened to become international in ...”

“... environmental policies. Now most Greens think reactionary national governments are the barrier to international co-operation on climate change. In the 1975 referendum on British membership of the EEC, the SNP were as keen on getting out as anyone: they saw European integration as a plot against the idea of national independence. In the 2014 referendum on ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”