“... 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 ...”

“... save the Syrian people from many other horrors,’ Slaughter conceded, and ‘it is illegal under international law.’ But ‘it at least draws a line somewhere & says enough.’ ‘The deterioration of the intelligentsia,’ Arthur Koestler wrote, ‘is as much a symptom of disease as the corruption of the ruling class or the sleeping sickness of the ...”

“... in the street. Kidane Zekarias Habtemariam, a people smuggler originally from Eritrea, was on an international wanted list, accused of holding thousands of people from various African countries captive in a ‘safe house’ in Libya, where they were starved, beaten and raped while Kidane and his fellow smugglers extorted money from their relatives. Fuad’s ...”

“... a Burundian President. Among many barbarities, kinsmen of the dead President, a Hutu, assembled a group of schoolchildren at a petrol station in the central highlands of Burundi. The Tutsi scholars were separated from their classmates, corralled in the building, and burnt to death. Among the perpetrators was their headmaster, a Hutu. With the demise of ...”

“... the gay men I know have similar stories (recently, at the cinema watching 120 BPM, about the Aids crisis in Paris, my friend booked an HIV test halfway through). But what was I – what are we – panicking about, exactly? No one wants an avoidable chronic illness, but everyone knows that, in the West at least, HIV is now a manageable disease, making almost ...”

“... the Israeli Ministry of Health determined that prisoners as well as their guards were a priority group for vaccination, the public security minister, Amir Ohana, instructed the Israel Prisons Service to exclude ‘security prisoners’, of whom nearly all are Palestinian, from the inoculation campaign. Several weeks later, after a number of additional ...”

“... deep into the collective subconscious, from which they struggle to appear in periods of social crisis, often in the strangest of new clothes. The original meanings of the terms listed in this paragraph cannot now be expressed in Polish without complicated circumlocutions. The official doctrine of ‘Marxism-Leninism’ rests on two basic ...”

“... small United Nations force under Major-General Roméo Dallaire and the gallant contingent of the International Committee of the Red Cross under Philippe Gaillard had to confront them over and over again. This was one of the few real genocides of modern times. Apart from the Armenian massacres and the Holocaust, Pol Pot killed around two million people in ...”

“... literary critics have begun either to build on or to erode Davie’s theses. Right or wrong, The Crisis of the Democratic Intellect, like its 1961 predecessor The Democratic Intel led (recently reprinted by Edinburgh University Press), should have the virtue of being unignorable. The Crisis centres on what might too easily ...”

“... history, Napoleon and Hitler not excepted. It was heavy enough to crush the world, and in the Cuba crisis of 1962, it very nearly did so. There have been many good biographies of Khrushchev, the best of them Mark Frankland’s 1967 study and Edward Crankshaw’s Khrushchev: A Career (1966). Taubman refers to Crankshaw’s opinions rather seldom and then ...”

“... measure, and thereby effectively neutering Parliamentary opposition in the face of a ‘national crisis’. On 1 April 1996, the Monday of Easter week, the then Home Secretary, Michael Howard, made a surprise statement full of foreboding about imminent IRA violence and the need for immediate legislation to prevent it. Various lacunae in the law had been ...”

“... as his chief. They did not get on, and when Gaitskell took Shinwell’s place after the fuel crisis of 1947, he earned a major enemy for many years to come. But what the diary reveals, more clearly than I have seen elsewhere, is the important part that Gaitskell, though not a full member of the Cabinet, played thanks to his membership of the Cabinet’s ...”

“... an African American man … threatening me.’ As W.E.B. Du Bois wrote in a 1932 essay for the Crisis: ‘Nothing in the world is easier in the United States than to accuse a black man of crime.’The same could be said today, more than half a century after the end of legal segregation. In 1989 five black and Latino teenagers, described by the police as a ...”

“... protests over fuel price rises were ruthlessly suppress­ed in November: according to Amnesty International 304 people were killed. At home and abroad, the Shia coalition built up by Iran with immense effort since the revolution of 1979 was falling apart; the Iranian state and its two most powerful reg­ional allies, Hizbullah in Lebanon and the Hashd ...”