“... the Agrarian Reform imposed a regime of separated powers that was almost as cumbersome as James Madison’s Constitution. (According to one of the bill’s Communist authors, ‘it was a bourgeois law.’ When grassroots activists complained about the slowness of reform, Arbenz responded: ‘I don’t care! You have to do things right!’) As Grandin ...”

“... into ironical euphemism, which shades into dandaical detachment. Flaubert, in despair at the Franco-Prussian war, and trying to maintain the primacy of art, commented that in the long run, perhaps the only function of such carnage was to provide writers with a few fine scenes. So here, the function of the octogenarian Breton woman who hangs herself, or ...”

“... opposition parties. Lugo became the presidential candidate of this alliance, with Federico Franco from the Liberals as his vice-president. Their six-point programme includes land reform (and a land survey), reform of the judiciary and ‘recovery of sovereignty’ – taken to mean a revision of the unequal treaties with Brazil and Argentina that ...”

“... At a mass demonstration for Ethiopia in Trafalgar Square a few months later, C.L.R. James, Amy Ashwood Garvey and Jomo Kenyatta approached the colonialism question more subtly. ‘You have talked of the “White Man’s Burden”,’ Ashwood Garvey observed. ‘Now we are carrying yours and standing between you and fascism.’During the Arab ...”

“... House’s ‘Special’ The Falkland Islands Dispute – International Dimensions Professor James Fawcett agrees on line 3 that ‘the determination of territorial title, when it is disputed, is a complex issue of fact and law,’ and asserts on line 31 that ‘the territorial title to the islands... must be accorded to the United Kingdom.’ On this ...”

“... cover was to join the pro-Nazi Anglo-German Fellowship and to become an active sympathiser with Franco (by whom he was decorated). The real scandal about Philby’s recruitment was that we were fighting a war against Fascism and yet MI5 was quite happy to promote into a leading position someone with overtly pro-Fascist views. Nor can this have been a ...”

“... Hollis, the director-general of MI5, David Murphy, the CIA chief of Soviet Bloc Intelligence, and James Bennett, head of Canadian counter-espionage, were all denounced as likely Soviet agents by conspiracy theorists within their own services. In his recently published memoirs,* President Carter’s DCI, Stansfield Turner, records that ‘British intelligence ...”

“... of clubland skulduggery.Yet this is the standard, both of writing and editing and research. When James Jesus Angleton, crazed and criminal head of the CIA, suffered himself to be asked a few questions by a panel of cringing Congressmen, he took care to tell them that they had no right to inquire into his business, and were not in any case equipped to ...”

“... full of brilliant and terrifying men. Then Karel came to direct a play by the Italian playwright Franco Brusati. His friend Lindsay Anderson, under whose colours I was hiding, had recommended me to be the assistant director on the play. Soon the play collapsed and I was transferred (I’m not sure I was consulted) to work on the film that Karel had decided ...”

“... de Jouvenel, Drieu la Rochelle and other young idealists to Berlin for a gruesome attempt at a Franco-German rapprochement. That’s about half of what she did. The writing, quoted here, seems already as concrete, intense and precise as it would ever be. Although she had the self-made woman’s disdain for feminism, the qualities of her style were ...”

“... him an inscribed copy of Chroniques and a gold medal depicting Napoleon and Marie Louise), was pro-Franco, and willing to curry favour with the Nazis if it meant he could go on performing in Germany. It is alarming to read on practically the last page of this book that Craft was trying to limit access to a proposed Stravinsky archive at UCLA in case evidence ...”

“... of the West. By the end of the 19th century, Germany had not only united but had triumphed in the Franco-Prussian War and expanded its industrial capacity to overtake Britain’s. The promoters of the First World War in Britain and France left no doubt that it was a war between democratic civilisation and barbarian tyranny. For their part, German thinkers ...”

“... richer tradition than Kissinger’s example suggests. Stretching from Randolph Bourne and William James to George Kennan and William Fulbright, the pragmatic realist tradition in American diplomatic thought held that it was necessary to consider the consequences of ideas and had an outlook characterised by a humane, cosmopolitan restraint in foreign and ...”

“... Jerry Bruck which took apart the case for Alma’s ordering of the symphony – conductors such as James Conlon have reverted to playing the movements in the same order that Mahler did. It makes a huge difference, Conlon has written, to hear the ‘meditative beauty’ of the andante before the ‘acerbic, ironic’ scherzo. The assumption of the Lehrer song ...”

“... in return for France’s naval support in the Mediterranean. Nor could Britain tolerate a joint Franco-Russian military triumph, which would exclude it from the Mediterranean and jeopardise Egypt and India. Given current imperial strains, there was no logic in making Russia an enemy, while to make one of France would be to commit suicide as a Great ...”