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“... railway station, as Grandparents for Climate adjust their hearing devices. ‘Rebellion!’ a group of a dozen activists responds before folding into the crowd.Dover, a few days later. A young police officer is visibly dismayed as she arrests an XR activist in her eighties for refusing to move from a roundabout. Other protesters applaud as their elderly ...”

“... such as Ulm and Osnabrück were putting on plays about asylum. But German perspectives on the crisis were sober and often self-congratulatory. They rarely spoke to the negotiations and absurdities of leaving one’s country. This carnival of well-meaning had a fetishistic quality that wasn’t lost on Syrians. In a series of interviews with Arab writers ...”

“... power-hungry desert fighters. But this has changed with the recent oil wealth, small as it is in international terms, at 100,000 barrels per day: enough to buy off dissent and acquire sophisticated weaponry for the army. The new Chad is a rentier state, disbursing patronage from a well of black gold. Before the oil, France used to tip the balance. On 1 ...”

“... of the people’s right to know, or is it a terrorist act that poses a threat to stable international relations? But what if this isn’t the real issue? What if the crucial ideological and political battle is going on within WikiLeaks itself: between the radical act of publishing secret state documents and the way this act has been reinscribed into ...”

“... J.M. Coetzee for that in English. They do not represent their own work. Both are novelists of international reputation, and the bias of the collection is towards writers little known in Britain, especially younger ones. All the Afrikaans-language writers and the great majority of the English-language writers live and work in South Africa at present. This ...”

“... longer the Baudelairean bohemian of melancholy and spleen but the super-animated impresario on an international tour of outlandish performances calculated to provoke artistic outrage and newspaper coverage. This kind of spectacle left its mark not only on other artistic movements, such as the Dada of Tristan Tzara, but also on new mass parties, above all ...”

“... by or on behalf of the late Shah, or from those first blow-by-blow accounts assembled by the international press corps, crowding into the Inter-Continental Hotel to witness the last days of the ancien régime. Glamorous titles, such as Iran: La Poudrière or Les Secrets de la Révolution Islamique, rarely bring any deeper analysis. The more ...”

“... the run-up to the 2017 general election, Theresa May might now be steering us through the Covid-19 crisis: trusted, sensible and reliable, however costively unimaginative and incapable of the nimble feats of very un-Conservative gymnastics so far performed by Boris Johnson’s chancellor, Rishi Sunak. And without that late surge, Johnson’s chief ...”

“... between the Milibands and marital disharmony in the Balls family is competition within this small group. The new politics which is supposedly emerging around Ed Miliband looks like being not much more than a further iteration of this Namierite struggle, as Miliband entrenches his position by marginalising potential rivals. In its reliance on the advice and ...”

“... hotels and offices, but this portrait was startlingly rakish. Our talk came to an end when a group of middle-aged men in shiny suits burst in, all of them sporting carefully trimmed, crescent-shaped moustaches and the glossy, tanned complexions seen on political smoothies everywhere. After a round of perfunctory handshakes they left as quickly as they ...”

“... repeatedly requested access and was usually denied. This was a strategy clearly intended to limit international scrutiny. What was, on the ground, a tremendous din of atrocities was transformed into a quiet war, out of sight and out of mind.Until war broke out, the big story in Ethiopia had been the remarkable rise to power of its prime minister, Abiy ...”

“... have similarly exaggerated the North Korean threat: indeed, the second North Korean nuclear crisis began in October 2002, when ‘sexed-up’ intelligence was used to push Pyongyang against the wall and make bilateral negotiations impossible. The complacent US public seems unperturbed by Bush’s failure so far to find a single WMD in Iraq, even if the ...”

“... the remaking of social order which accompanies that; and capitalism’s inherent tendency for crisis, for cycles of boom and bust. I should, however, admit that I haven’t quoted these sentences exactly as Marx wrote them: where I wrote ‘capitalism’, Marx had ‘the bourgeoisie’. He was talking about a class and the system which served its ...”

“... villas adjoined slums with no running water or electricity. Western sanctions meant international aid was reduced to a bare minimum. Rackets and rent-seeking became stronger than state institutions. Virtually no one paid tax.Things began to change around 2010. Than Shwe, who had been Burma’s dictator since 1992, was in his mid-seventies, and ...”

“... looming recession for ever, but in the short term, here was evidence that the ‘cost of living’ crisis, manifest in spiralling energy and food costs, isn’t afflicting everybody. For participants in the housing market (many of whom also built up their savings during lockdown), inflation is still comparatively innocuous, while interest rates remain low by ...”