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“... in his cabinet reshuffle last month was that of Anne-Marie Trevelyan as secretary of state for international development. An ardent Brexiteer, Trevelyan has no known interest in overseas development; just about her only previous public utterance on the subject was an observation that ‘charity begins at home.’ But then she is only the latest head of the ...”

“... think tanks and academic departments that include the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI), the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS), the Royal Institute for International Affairs (Chatham House) and the Department of War Studies at King’s College London. From fine old buildings in Whitehall, Temple, St ...”

“... Tehran, which had no intention of complying. The book relates the British response to the hostage crisis, culminating in the SAS’s assault on 5 May. Macintyre writes that the story of the siege was ‘presented afterwards as a straightforward morality tale of military daring, civilian bravery, patient police work and wicked foreign terrorists bent on ...”

“... Kwarteng, her new chancellor and close ally. Both were prominent members of the Free Enterprise Group of MPs; their book Britannia Unchained declared British workers to be ‘among the worst idlers in the world’. Her new cabinet, composed of loyalists and ideological confrères, suggests that her model for government is second-term Thatcher, a cabinet ...”

“... On a cold evening​ in early February 2011, a small group of activists spilled out of a squat in a Georgian townhouse on Bloomsbury Square. The building – recently purchased by a presenter on Antiques Roadshow – was then home to a loose collective running the Really Free School (RFS), a ramshackle series of political talks, film screenings and discussions ...”

“... the attacks, sucking blood from its people in payment for the food aid currently being supplied by international donors. This is a theory which can only have been made more credible by the World Food Programme’s use of the word ‘pipeline’ in relation to its food distribution system. ‘Our pipeline to Malawi is currently full,’ one spokesperson was ...”

“... One might think that Kennedy was right. The war in the former Yugoslavia; the slaughter of one group by another in Shaba – the old Katanga – in southern Zaire, and in neighbouring Burundi also, both on a similar scale to that in Bosnia and just as horrible; the collapse of Somalia; the revival of the war in Angola; the fragility of South ...”

“... The financial crisis – or, as we like to call it here, ‘the effects of the American and European financial crisis on Russia’ – has taken a little while to get going, but it’s going now. Yesterday my grandmother sat me down for a serious conversation: she wanted to know if she should take her rouble-denominated life savings out of the Sberbank and put them into dollars ...”

“... news is of nowhere, and you can savour the illusion of being somewhere that a global ecological crisis hasn’t yet set down under the same dire sky as everywhere else. One long weekend in mid-August, my partner and I, with the aid of a local guide and in the company of a dozen others, set out to hike up the steep, sodden slopes of Colombia’s Sierra ...”

“... he created an image of the German Reich as a militaristic, feudal and irresponsible actor in international affairs. The most modern and technologically advanced state in the world, with the most productive industries, the finest engineers and scientists, the highest standards of craftsmanship and production, had at its head a reactionary representative ...”

“... the latest eruption of the culture wars. And yet we also live in the shadow of the 2008 financial crisis, of accelerating climate breakdown and a pandemic. At the very least, these events render unsustainable any terminological equivalence between ‘society’ and ‘nation-state’. In subtle ways, they have also contributed to a new type of sociological ...”

“... journalism are long gone. When the Scottish Affairs Committee at Westminster discussed ‘the crisis in the Scottish press industry’ in 2009, the Herald was selling just under 60,000 copies a day; now that figure is less than 35,000. Of course, Scottish newspapers aren’t the only ones in trouble. The Independent and the Independent on Sunday ceased ...”

“... seer whose theories help us understand the predicament we are in, especially in times of economic crisis, an inspiration to everyone who wishes to see state and society emancipated and transformed. Or, alternatively, he was a misguided and misguiding ideologue whose theories have been responsible for some of the worst crimes of the 20th century. This book ...”

“... the US in Vietnam, and would disgrace friends and colleagues who had eagerly taken over new international responsibilities from the exhausted European empires after the Second World War. Kennan lost his influence inside the Beltway in the mid-1950s, after he began exhorting Americans to pursue ‘self-perfection’ and ‘spiritual ...”

“... 1990s, these two books nevertheless make important contributions to our understanding of today’s international turbulence and uncertainty. Taken together, they help unravel one of the deepest mysteries of American policy towards Iraq: namely, why dissent inside the US has been so tame and equivocal. Why have the keenest protests against Bush’s ...”