“... that an ‘African’ was anyone determined to make a future within Africa. It was pioneered by John Garang, the leader of the Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA) in the south, as a way of holding together the New Sudan he hoped to see. In contrast, its exclusive meaning came in two versions, one hard (racial) and the other soft ...”

“... on leftist weaklings. Democrats still choke over the slick media campaign that soon transformed John Kerry into a coward and traitor who should have his war medals stripped from him and then – right-wing radio made this their favourite cause – be tried for treason. Democrats admired a war hero who came home and criticised the war; Republicans despised ...”

“... or, lower down the scale, theorists of humanitarian intervention from Harvard or Princeton like John Ruggie and Michael Doyle, speaks for itself. But since the real work of the UN is the manufacture not of actions but of legitimations, the two key figures were the set’s ventriloquists, who wrote the speeches and articles furbishing the secretary-general ...”

“... blow at his reader: ‘What is there to say back to that eh? Eh eh eh eh?’ he crowed to John Minton in 1945 after a remarkable display of punning and crudity, and, more slyly, to Michael Snow in 1980, after a (seemingly) confidential account of his loneliness and rising panic on the first day of one of Nessie’s absences, ‘Do you think it is too ...”

“... Blair’s call for the 1951 Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees to be rewritten, and John Townend’s complaint about the ‘mongrelisation’ of Britain.) Balfour warned Parliament that the Jews ‘remained a people apart, and not merely held a religion differing from the vast majority of their fellow countrymen, but only intermarried among ...”

“... economic and social policies which were explosively incompatible and which eventually did for John Major’s Government, and a reckless ‘re-engineering’ of the country’s social structure which ultimately went disastrously wrong for the Tories. She brought into being a middle class which, it turns out, has no overriding loyalty to the Conservative ...”

“... Joyce apparently replied: ‘Psychoanalysis? Well if we need it, let us stick to confession.’ John Gatt-Rutter, whose biography of Svevo came out in 1988, tells us that Svevo was dumbfounded by Joyce’s response. But perhaps he was stimulated by it, for the novel he would go on to write expresses a rather similar sentiment. Renato Poggioli once wrote ...”

“... Years later, when much cream had been spread and rouge faded and money spent, figures such as John Richardson, Graham Sutherland and Bruce Chatwin would have dealings with Helena Rubinstein. Rubinstein trusted Richardson, in as much as she trusted anyone, because he told her that certain paintings in her vast art collection that she believed were ...”

“... practical about it. In his attempts to lobby politicians about Aids, he met an aide to Senator John McCain, indifferent to the issue he had come to raise. ‘Her voice was so high,’ he writes, ‘it could only be heard by bats.’ Despite his general sweetness and his social conscience, Rupert remains lovable to the end of this book. When Sharon Stone ...”

“... Wilson, an academic by training, was fortified in his convictions by such liberal intellectuals as John Dewey, Walter Lippmann and Herbert Croly (co-founder of the New Republic), who believed that by joining the war America would make the world safe for democracy rather than, as was the case, help the Allied powers deliver a knockout blow to the Germans. As ...”

“... 1505, she grew up, probably, on her father’s estates in Essex. Jane’s mother was Alice St John, daughter of a Bedfordshire landowner. Her father was Henry, Lord Morley, the scholarly translator of Petrarch and Plutarch. David Starkey begins an essay on Lord Morley by wondering whether we should class him like Prufrock as an ‘attendant ...”

“... led al-Suri to assume, not unreasonably, that he and other jihadis had a tacit agreement with John Major that they ‘would never target Britain as long as the security forces left us alone’, and he abided by the ‘truce’. He spoke regularly to al-Zawahiri from a telephone box in the London suburbs, and came to serve as a liaison between British ...”

“... is a bit of an old sod.’He is more critical of Donald Davie, saying in a sympathetic letter to John Montague apropos of a bad review that Davie is a ‘grotesquely shrunken silly imitator of Pound’, the receptacle of every other critic’s ‘dud cartridges & empty cases’, ‘the mincy mean know-all kind of little office snot’. His poetry is ‘all ...”

“... enthusiasts may develop a sudden infatuation for tariffs. In 1933, during the Great Depression, John Maynard Keynes changed his mind (as he famously claimed he had every right to do) and conceded, as it turned out wrongly, that ‘a greater measure of national self-sufficiency and economic isolation between countries, than existed in 1914, may tend to serve ...”

“... of its electoral successes. Against the Washington Consensus, a term introduced by the economist John Williamson to describe the standard package of neoliberal reforms, stood the Buenos Aires Consensus, a manifesto signed in 2003 by the heads of Brazil and Argentina, Lula (Luiz Inácio da Silva) and Néstor Kirchner. Yet while Pink Tide governments mounted a ...”