“... impossible to do good work, and be a decent person, and experience just about tolerable levels of peace of mind? ‘The sense of limitless freedom that I, as a woman, sometimes feel is that of a new kind of being. Because I simply could not have existed, as I am, in any other preceding time or place.’ Being, she went on, ‘the pure product of an ...”

“... Dante, Boccaccio, More, Machiavelli, Montaigne, Hobbes, Bayle, Voltaire, Sterne, Diderot, David, Stendhal, Flaubert, Tolstoy, Warburg, Proust, Kracauer, Picasso and many more, each an extraordinary display of learning. No other living historian approaches the range of this erudition. Every page of Threads and Traces, his latest work to appear in ...”

“... the first Marxist theorists of globalisation (or of ‘historical-geographical materialism’, in David Harvey’s more recent phrase). Her unfinished Introduction to Political Economy, based on her lectures at the Social Democratic Party school in Berlin from 1907 to 1914, included a chapter titled ‘The Dissolution of Primitive Communism: From the Ancient ...”

“... as the valet’s perspective on the future of the continent. Thomas Meaney GreeceTwo years ago, David Cameron saw himself out of office, respecting the result of the referendum he had unwisely called. For three years now, Alexis Tsipras has clung to power in Athens by disrespecting the results of his own referendum. The Eurozone’s one-time guerrilla ...”

“... Even before the pandemic they saw Tedros as China’s man. ‘The US has never really been at peace with the WHO. I mean it’s not a new thing,’ Seye Abimbola, editor of the journal BMJ Global Health, told me in a call from Sydney. ‘There’s always been a history of some kind of suspicion that it’s socialism.’As head of the WHO, Tedros ...”

“... breakdown of the Zurich arrangements in a stronger position. The UN force had brought a precarious peace. Turkey’s threats to invade Cyprus were quashed by a brusque missive from President Johnson. American schemes for ‘double enosis’, dividing the island into portions to be allocated to Greece and Turkey, got nowhere. In late 1965, the UN General ...”

“... a communist. They are so small-minded that they can’t give anyone credit for wanting life and peace even more than world-domination. I get stared at in horror when I suggest that we are as guilty in this as Russia is; that we are warmongers too.’ Legions of teenagers, and not only teenagers, would agree.The letters to her mother multiplied when she ...”

“... in the mass graves in Sinjar.’The president is amazed to learn Murad has been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, which he covets and believes he deserves: ‘That’s incredible. They gave it to you for what reason?’*The president comments on the election of Boris Johnson: ‘Good man. He’s tough and he’s smart. They’re saying “Britain Trump”. They ...”

“... Palestine. It refused to criticise the armed struggle, or to parrot the PA’s rhetoric about the peace process, positions that lost it some potential funding. It attacked the PA’s collaboration with Israel, and described itself as part of a struggle against occupation rather than another ‘capacity-building’ organisation. Yet the Freedom Theatre ...”

“... by psychiatric symptoms. Fanon’s most reliable biographers – Cherki and the British historian David Macey, whose book also appeared in 2000 – have tended to dismiss the dissertation, but Young and Khalfa make a strong case for its importance. In the very last line of Black Skin, White Masks, Fanon wrote: ‘O my body, make of me always a man who always ...”

“... Grace Academy in Brixton. The programme was launched in 2000 by the then education secretary, David Blunkett, who explained that if sponsors put up £2 million, or 20 per cent of the capital costs, such ‘businesses, individuals, churches or voluntary bodies’ would get ‘considerable freedom over management structures and processes’, and of course a ...”

“... surprised when it was trounced at the polls in 2010.Three years​ before the financial crisis, David Cameron had been elected to lead the Conservatives, promising to make them a more appealing alternative to Labour after the serial fiascos of his predecessors. Unlike them, he was not a Eurosceptic and made sure he got into office without damaging ...”

“... right and Bosie and I have taken to haschish: it is quite exquisite: three puffs of smoke and then peace and love.’ On Sunday 27 January André Gide, also in Algiers, was, according to his own account, checking out of the Grand Hôtel d’Orient when he saw the names ‘Oscar Wilde’ and ‘Alfred Douglas’ on the slate on which guests’ names were ...”

“... waving cushions and towels, and some were leaning out. It happened that one of the firefighters, David Badillo, knew two of the uncles, Carlos and Manfred Ruiz, from the sports centre – they had all worked there as lifeguards – and Melanie gave Badillo her keys to their flat, 176 on the 20th floor. (They still hadn’t heard from Jessica.) Badillo went ...”

“... for its emancipation of the subcontinent after the war – the finest hour, in the view of David Marquand, in Attlee’s career. The reality is that the transfer of power put through Parliament in the first week of July 1947, amid an outpouring of self-congratulation on all sides, was literally breakneck: not for those who voted it, but those who ...”