“... the Rivonia days. We can all feel proud of Mandela and Sisulu, of Fischer and, yes, of Joffe. He may be Lord Joffe these days but he played his part. What none of us can feel happy about is that Mandela invited Percy Yutar to his presidential inauguration and later went out of his way to visit him and shake his hand. Mandela explained such gestures by the ...”

“... free lee-gal ad-vice-ah’. Who is the joke on here? Who cares? Sit back and enjoy the ride. It may be that the reason all this works is that Dylan is Dylan, and simply hearing him do something as mundane as spinning a few records and reading out a couple of emails exerts its own magnetic pull. But radio can make the most interesting people sound boring if ...”

“... degree exploiting her youth and unmarried status to ask naive questions and elicit richer answers may have made her particularly sensitive to the way her woman informants had used ‘ignorance’ to their own advantage. If Beier, in the end, tells us a familiar story – mothers had power, and they lost it – Fisher gives us something more complex and ...”

“... to upgrade bases, roads and telecommunications. After Osama left Saudi Arabia for the last time in May 1991, he followed the well-worn path of the ‘semi-independent bin Laden brothers’ by starting ventures of his own in and around Khartoum: the bin Laden organisation won the contract to build a new Saudi-funded airport in Sudan. King Fahd ordered Bakr to ...”

“... no one does. Yet few can afford a photovoltaic cell of their own, and that’s a pity. Conditions may be ripe for a renaissance of environmental technology, but it won’t be possible to order it from a catalogue. Barack Obama, caught on tape during a debate-prep session last year, identified the need for a collective solution: ‘We can’t solve global ...”

“... thought that Britain was the last country that should be pillorying Mugabe, however awful he may be, in view of its past relations with his country); and if Africans could come to regard ‘transparency, honesty and accountability’ as just as much African values – they will certainly have some African precedents – as ‘Western’ ones. You can’t ...”

“... in them. Berlusconi is our own Kung Fu Panda. As the Marx Brothers might have put it, ‘this man may look like a corrupt idiot and act like a corrupt idiot, but don’t let that deceive you – he is a corrupt idiot.’ To get a glimpse of the reality beneath this deception, call to mind the events of July 2008, when the Italian government proclaimed a state ...”

“... in the 14th century: ‘The truth … is that no such people do exist as nations, though there may be an individual monster here and there.’ For Hobbes the cannibal was a very useful part of his thought experiment. The war of all against all would be at its most virulent where pre-social individuals ate each other when they met. And they ...”

“... fewer skulls than skeletons. The Anglo-Saxons had a word, heafod-stocc (‘head-stake’), that may explain the discrepancy: it is likely that three heads were put up on stakes along the ridge-line. Study of isotopes in the teeth indicated that most of the dead were Scandinavians, and that they were all male and mostly young. They had the well-developed ...”

“... American military tradition that prefers light and agile to massive and lumbering, but it may not be insignificant that his home state, Arizona, is one of the few where Lockheed has recently shed jobs rather than piled them on. (What Arizona has instead of multiple Lockheed facilities is the 309th Aerospace Maintenance and Regeneration Group at ...”

“... if I drink one in Australia? But actually, I realise, I won’t be there. The Russian public may be indifferent to the centenary of their Revolution, but international scholars are off on the academic pilgrimage trail, giving the Revolution a ‘deep, objective, professional evaluation’ at conferences from Sundsvall to Santiago. The title of my as yet ...”

“... rescinded blacks’ right to vote almost entirely. Nathans notes these events, but not how they may have affected life on the Cameron land, or what strategies black purchasers deployed to hold onto their farms. It remains unclear how much the closing off of political participation influenced the decision to move to the North. Nathans notes that an oral ...”

“... female, even slave and free, melted away in the fires of war. ‘Our fathers, husbands and sons may perhaps be the victims of our enemies’ fury,’ a petition from the Société Fraternelle des Minimes declared, signed by three hundred women. ‘Could we be forbidden the sweetness of avenging them or dying at their sides?’ The axioms of 1789 had to be ...”

“... and landscape’. ‘He never built an ugly thing or a boring one.’ But the aqueduct at Longdon may seem to challenge this dictum. It too consists of an iron trough, but a shallow one, and only sixty yards long between the abutments. It is supported on three pairs of squat iron trestles, I would guess not more than 15 feet high, bedded into squares of ...”

“... government, which has also prioritised its own survival over citizens’ democratic rights. But we may also find in this earlier period the seeds of another post-Soviet phenomenon: a longing for a mythic era in which stability and order prevailed. It was fuelled by the collapse of the Soviet social system in the 1990s, and has been strategically nurtured by ...”