“... 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 ...”

“... very low ebb. Production had already declined under Gorbachev; under Yeltsin the decline became a crisis. By 1995, in the course of the lurch towards a capitalist economy, national income and industrial production had fallen to about half their levels in 1990. The privatisation of industry which accompanied this decline is graphically described by Roy ...”

“... be the last, but the numbers, the brutality and the fact that the girls were Christians roused the international community. Oby Ezekwesili, a former education minister and World Bank vice-president for Africa, organised a sit-in at a national park in Abuja, the Nigerian capital, with the hashtag #BringBackOurGirls, which was taken up by celebrities around the ...”

“... with the Beaujon hospital in Paris and the medical review Tonus, were discussing how to organise international volunteering. Kouchner joined the group early on, and became its most visible and charismatic face. This group evolved into Médecins sans frontières, which Paul Berman ...”

“... with the wild colonial boys in Australia and, for a time, white South Africa, dominated the international scene. The Brits made the key decisions and went unchallenged. The West Indies have too many fast bowlers who are difficult to bat against? Change the law: restrict the bouncers to one an over. Pakistan’s seamers can reverse-swing an old ...”

“... King Otto of Greece, on the other hand, a member of the Bavarian royal family enthroned by the international agreement that recognised Greece’s independence from the Ottoman Empire, became deeply unpopular: he imported so many German bureaucrats to run the country that his government was called the ‘Bavarocracy’ and was overthrown in a coup. Prince ...”

“... and media commentators too seems to be drawn from another era. In November, a murky online group called PropOrNot went full McCarthy by releasing ‘The List’, designed to name and shame – or indeed casually smear – websites which it believes ‘reliably echo Russian propaganda’. In January, Fox News rolled back the years by announcing that ...”

“... that it was a more complicated affair than people had assumed at the time: the picture of a small group of fascists rising, as part of a carefully-organised international conspiracy, against a beleaguered democracy was false; the democracy was ailing and had suffered before 1936 from the militancy of both anarchists and ...”

“... by waiting for regional dynamics to change in his favour. Forced to cope with the pressure and international isolation imposed by the Bush administration after the Iraq War, Assad studied his father’s way of doing things and sought to convince everyone that it was impossible to stabilise the region without Syria’s help: a peace deal with ...”

“... by royal decree. But he was also a refugee who fled his country of origin in a moment of political crisis, never to return, and lived for the rest of his life in Western Europe, without learning to speak a language other than Arabic. After his death in 1873, the civil court of Livorno declared him stateless, a ‘cosmopolitan’ who ‘did not belong to any ...”

“... the period 1981-2, there was practically no economic growth. Unprecedented stagnation and crisis occurred, during the period 1979-82, when production of 40 per cent of all industrial goods actually fell.’ The crisis of Communism had arrived. Economic reform was needed, but for that to happen there had to be an ...”

“... a full-blooded revolution – but with no trained revolutionaries to give it direction. The only group capable of assuming the leadership was the ad hoc committee established by mutinous soldiers, the Derg. It took almost two years of near-chaos, widespread killing and purges within the Army before a revolutionary élite finally emerged under the ...”

“... intention all along, from his early stint as a photojournalist in Cyprus (1964), through the Congo Crisis (1964), the ‘Indian famine’ in Bihar (1967), Biafra and Vietnam (1968), Cambodia (1970), Northern Ireland (1970), East Pakistan, shortly to become Bangladesh (1971), the Karantina massacre of Palestinians, Kurds and others during the civil war in ...”

“... of equal civil rights is not enough to expunge the folk memory which sustains nationalism. A group of Québecois professionals recently made the point that the old arguments for separatism have been overtaken by events. In the Sixties, Francophones made up 25 per cent of the Canadian population but held only 10 per cent of the top jobs in the Federal ...”