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“... 1. The concept of sovereignty may refer to the political control that a leader exercises over a society and territory, or the psychic control that an individual exercises over herself. 2. Sovereignty has a long history in political thought, not least in relation to the expansion of European imperial powers. But it was in Spanish America that its modern form – applied to non-imperial or non-colonial nation states – was first put into effective use as a diplomatic norm ...”

“... The Amazon basin​ is roughly the size of the continental United States and contains more than a thousand shifting tributaries. If it had been found at the edge of human settlement, it would have been more comprehensible to European colonisers. Frontiers symbolise limits to knowledge and boundaries to movement; their meaning is encapsulated in a simple injunction – push on ...”

“... In early September 2005, a week after Hurricane Katrina, the police and National Guard arrested Abdulrahman Zeitoun, a Syrian immigrant who worked in New Orleans as a building contractor and landlord. Zeitoun was seized on his own property; the unidentified officers refused to tell him why he’d been arrested. They took him to Union Terminal, a train and bus station that had been hastily converted into a mini supermax jail, where he was processed in the passenger lobby, below a neglected cubist fresco, a four-wall epic that gives a concentrated version in violent oranges and reds of Louisiana’s history, including the Spanish conquest of the Mississippi Valley, the torture of Native Americans, the chattel slavery that built New Orleans, the nightriders of the Ku Klux Klan, oil rigs, wars and mass graves ...”

“... The 1930s, the chronicler of American poverty Michael Harrington once said, ended in 1948, when the Cold War began to call into question the idea that democracy would lead to socialism. But by that definition, perhaps the 1930s didn’t really end until 11 September 1973, when Pinochet launched his coup against Salvador Allende, Chile’s democratically elected Marxist president, and Allende committed suicide in the national palace ...”

“... Henry Kissinger’s realpolitik, with its moral relativism and easy acceptance of American limits, is often contrasted with the neocon evangelism that took off after the attacks of 9/11. Kissinger had long served as a foil for the New Right. The secretary of state ‘sounds like Churchill’ but ‘acts like Chamberlain’, Norman Podhoretz wrote in 1976 ...”

“... The people of South America are the most ignorant, the most bigoted, the most superstitious of all the Roman Catholics in Christendom,’ John Adams, the second American president, wrote in 1815. The notion that they could form a ‘confederation of free governments’, as the Venezuelan revolutionary Francisco de Miranda had proposed, was as ‘absurd as similar plans would be to establish democracies among the birds, beasts and fishes ...”

“... By the end​ of the last century, Venezuela’s old constitutional order, which for four decades had rotated power between two ideologically indistinguishable parties, was close to collapse. The crisis had started decades earlier, in 1983, when the bottom fell out of the world oil market. Then, as now, Venezuela derived most of its state revenue from the export of petroleum ...”

“... slave ship that had been captured off the coast of West Africa by a French privateer. Greg Grandin, whose new book recovers the Tryal rebellion and its literary afterlives, likes the image of a French Jacobin ship towing an English slave vessel towards the Spanish-American frontier. These ‘floating contradictions of the Age of ...”

“... it is Cuba, Chile and Nicaragua rather than Guatemala that earn most of the attention. But, as Greg Grandin shows in The Last Colonial Massacre, Latin America was as much a battleground of the Cold War as Europe, and Guatemala was its front line. In 1954, the US fought its first major contest against Communism in the Western hemisphere when it ...”

“... Brazil? The story of Ford’s not-so-excellent adventure in the jungle is a writer’s dream and Greg Grandin takes full advantage of its dramatic potential. Along the Tapajós, a tributary of the Amazon, Ford fought two battles in which the lessons he had learned in Michigan turned out to be handicaps. The first was with the workers of the Brazilian ...”

“... to favour individual testimony, and individual redress, rather than dealing with larger issues. As Greg Grandin argued in the American Historical Review in 2005, this approach – with the notable exception of Guatemala – is directly at odds with the collective demands that led the left to take up arms in the first place. The Colombian report is ...”

“... Many of the case-histories are similar to the cases in the earlier book or amplifications of them. Greg, ‘The Last Hippie’, a Krishna convert whose progressive brain tumour was mistaken by his fellow worshippers for special spiritual illumination, has a detachment from his illness similar to that of Jimmie, the Korsakov amnesiac. Jimmie’s memory came to ...”