“... is more a matter of style than substance, of tone than content. The ‘hump’ of the profession may not have raged about whites’ inalienable ‘right to their racial heritage’, but Vitalis could find no white international relations scholar in this era who directly challenged white privilege by supporting equal citizenship rights and colonial ...”

“... Kierkegaard and Merleau-Ponty, and plausibly suggests that Sartre’s writing on Giacometti may have stimulated de Kooning’s interest in him, which is visible in the sculpture he began making himself around 1969. The new medium gave de Kooning new ways of not stopping – ‘with clay, I cover it with a wet cloth and come back to it the next morning ...”

“... its shelves of etiquette manuals and well-thumbed copies of Burke’s Landed Gentry, Poole’s may seem an anachronism, but their suits are still much in demand; there’s something very aspirational about commissioning a Savile Row suit. I was taken to see the pattern room, in one of the vaults under the road intended for coal, which was hung with ...”

“... twenty years has tended to confirm what we already knew about Stalin, but it also suggests that we may have been asking the wrong questions. At issue is not whether he was a ‘weak leader’ or a man ‘responding to events’. The major decisions of his administration – on collectivisation, the Great Terror and upping the tempo of the Cold War – were all ...”

“... wall.What is lost is already behind the locked doors.The fear is for what is still to be lost.You may see nothing still to be lost.Yet there is no day in her life on which I do not see her.In the American editions of these memoirs, the lighter letters on the cover of The Year of Magical Thinking spell ‘JOHN’. The lighter letters on the cover of Blue ...”

“... or lack thereof displayed by senior officers. Given the right circumstances, a particular general may wield clout approaching MacArthur’s before he self-destructed. This was the case with Colin Powell in the wake of Operation Desert Storm, and with David Petraeus when the Iraq Surge of 2007-08 seemed, briefly, to represent a historic triumph. At other ...”

“... plans for the Paras, and then expected the soldiers to sort out any problems for themselves. In May 1982, near the tiny settlement of Goose Green, ‘H’ Jones led a Para assault of questionable strategic value against a larger Argentinian force, which had access to ground-attack aircraft, artillery guns and napalm. If you go to Goose Green you can ...”

“... of tolerance and that if, as is often the case in royal circles, there are no limits, minor tics may become monstrous. The wife of one of her staff described the Duchess of Devonshire to Pope-Hennessy as being ‘Queen Mary’s type, very regal, wouldn’t speak to you unless she wanted something and never thanked you either’, which suggests she considered ...”

“... to sanction them. The extraction of equity often means profits now, costs later – and the costs may be borne by someone else, since they accrue to the firm, not to those who appropriate the profits. In developed capitalist countries, this formula has been generating outsize fortunes at the price of outsize misery for the past forty years at ...”

“... regime’s eternal strength, was at the Grand People’s Study House on Kim Il-sung Square. You may have seen this on TV – it’s the building from which Kim Jong-un watches rallies and parades of missiles and tanks. Despite the military associations, the building is actually a library, where – at least in theory – any Korean can come and attend ...”

“... On​ 22 May 1856, Preston Brooks, a member of the US House of Representatives from South Carolina, strode into the Senate chamber shortly after the daily session had ended. Two days earlier, Charles Sumner, the Senate’s most outspoken critic of slavery, had delivered a five-hour speech, ‘The Crime against Kansas ...”

“... from defending itself. Three and a bit years after the new constitution came into effect on 3 May 1947, North Korean forces invaded the South, all available US occupation troops were rushed to hold a collapsing front, and in defenceless Japan the supreme supremo General MacArthur, whose men had drafted Article 9, ordered the quick build-up of an army in ...”

“... other people’s reaction to violence and death seemed a thrill worth seeking. Here, Whitman may not have sought out the despairing woman – but he still watches in ‘ecstasy’ and offers no comfort. Is this the Mystery, that the spectacle we like to watch is the misery of others? Whitman and Fuckhead are both voyeurs, responding to the purity of a ...”

“... of IS making a comeback in Syria? All sides, Syrian and foreign, say they are against IS but they may privately calculate that its total elimination is not in their interests. ‘I met many people in Raqqa and Deir Ezzor this week,’ someone who frequently travels to both places says, ‘who are upset because they say the SDF is trying to keep the fight ...”

“... liberal Democrat, ‘he would no longer be our chief of police.’ Last year’s protests in LA may be seen by future historians as part of an ongoing radical tradition. But the change in LA that began in the 1960s has only gone so ...”