“... 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 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... charismatic leader (he would resign from the Party the following year), began meeting with a group of young people who would become the nucleus of the Salvadoran revolution. Some came from the Communist Youth, others from non-Marxist Catholic groups in the student movement. Among them were a young poet called Eduardo Sancho, who had struck up a ...”

“... genocidal, I would, I imagine, be uncertain how to proceed. An unprovoked attack on my target group with whatever weapon came to hand might take out a few of them, but also bring my venture to a premature end. Reflecting that few are lucky enough to be in a position to do the job themselves, I could either confine myself to advocacy, or else embark on the ...”