“... resources, including crude oil, which accounts for 80 per cent of GDP and 90 per cent of foreign exchange earnings. Obasanjo, who found himself at the helm of state (‘against my personal wish and desire’), following the assassination of his mentor, General Murtala Muhammed, in a botched coup attempt, was quick to see that he was required to step ...”

“... It was, as one tabloid put it, ‘Stalin’s Atom Bomb’. How could a nation confronting so many foreign threats allow itself to be sidetracked like this? (This is not just a question for historians: in recent months, Congress has devoted considerable energy to debating gay marriage, while in the last 13 years the US military has fired 55 of its Arabic ...”

“... residents have been replaced by Muslims; it has considerably increased in size and is now full of office buildings, shops, restaurants, schools, institutes and taxis, all catering to ‘al-Dafah’, or ‘the Bank’ as it is known. But there are only a tiny number of hotels in Ramallah, nor is it any longer a resort. While I was there during the second half ...”

“... Club once a week. He saw Harold Wilson every week too, with the other members of the ‘White Commonwealth’, as the handpicked political editors were then called. Yet he did not grow to love or respect these great men. On the contrary, in his book he portrays most of the prime ministers he was intimate with as ...”

“... The theme​ of the latest Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting (it was meant to take place in June but has been postponed because of Covid-19) is ‘Delivering a Common Future: Connecting, Innovating, Transforming’. It is to be held in Kigali, hosted by Paul Kagame, Rwanda’s president for the last two decades: proof enough of his continued good standing in the West ...”

“... remained the gist of the objection to them by British policy-makers (the people at the Foreign Office, for example); together with the fact that, as they knew full well, but didn’t always let on, Britain’s legal title to the islands was highly dubious. It was anomalous that they remained colonies (or ‘overseas dependencies’) long after ...”

“... teaching career began soon after: first, as a junior research fellow at the Institute of Commonwealth Studies in London; and, subsequently, as a research officer in the International Labour Office at Geneva and a Ford Foundation research fellow at the Centre for International and Area Studies at the University of ...”

“... Te Deum, which because of the terrible heat wafted fitfully around the arena; the flag of the new commonwealth was hoisted, and the artillery thundered and cheer after cheer ran around the great arena.’ You don’t need the stylistic scrupulousness of Turgenev to see that the use of the word ‘great’, if it was intended to offset the repetition of the ...”

“... in his conclusion, ‘depends absolutely on the nature of domestic policy choices’ (my italics). Foreign policy, as once conceived, is not dismissed: but it is taken to be ancillary to the socio-economic priorities of the nation-state. Milward postulates a virtually unconditional Primat der Innenpolitik. The second assumption – logically distinct from the ...”

“... He retained his popularity, and his ability to call up a violent mob, long after his year in office ended and Cicero returned to Rome. Clodius ran for one of the eight praetorships – the second most senior level of magistrate after the two consuls – of 52 BC, his victory a foregone conclusion, although the elections were declared void on account of ...”

“... revenue from crude oil, currently estimated at $11 billion a year (90 per cent of the country’s foreign exchange earnings), is entirely in the hands of the Western multinationals – Agip, BP, Chevron, Exxon, Shell, Texaco, Total – who between them operate the existing fields and prospect for new ones. Other resources – cashew ...”

“... arms salesmen. This time Aitken comes clean. In his book’s acknowledgments he thanks the Kazakh foreign ministry for free hotel accommodation and Sir Richard Evans, the former chairman of BAE Systems, for several free plane rides around Kazakhstan. (Evans was hired by Nazarbayev to sort out the national airline and was later given control of Samruk, a state ...”

“... rebel leader of anti-Vichy forces in London and Algiers, and then, between 1946 and his return to office in 1958, as a brooding absence in French political life. Removing himself from view the better to be seen was both a tactic and a strategy, as Sudhir Hazareesingh argues in a fascinating study of the De Gaulle myth. He might sweep up his papers and stride ...”

“... new players. The City of Manchester Stadium, built with £127 million of public money for the 2002 Commonwealth Games in the poorest part of town, has been renamed the Etihad Stadium, after the Abu Dhabi airline which pays lavishly for the privilege. The executives appointed by the new regime have been diligent in expressing their respect for the club’s ...”

“... except as a source of patronage, and thus preferred to stay on the hacienda rather than in the office.2. A very powerful bicameral, single district/single representative Congress, recruited from a restricted, property-based electorate (as late as 1940 less than 14 per cent of voting-age Filipinos were actually voting) and ‘organised’ through a ...”