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“... pace militates against the patient economic excavation Hobsbawm practised in essays such as ‘The Crisis of the 17th Century’ (1954). If we move from the first to the second term of the programme of the trilogy, a different set of issues is posed, conceptual more than empirical. It might be said that these begin with the famous idea of the dual revolution ...”

“... Nigel Lawson became a non-executive director of Barclays Bank and an adviser within the Barclays Group. His two-day-a-week job was reportedly worth £100,000 a year. Shortly afterwards, he became a director of the GPA Group, then the world’s biggest aircraft leasing company, with a salary estimated at £40,000 per annum ...”

“... yet quite knows how to fit the lockdown years into their sense of themselves or society: neither a crisis nor an era, but some unnameable combination of the two. (Memories of the pandemic seem uncommonly dependent on stray artefacts from those years; I had one such jolt the other day, when I accidentally pulled up an email from summer 2020, informing me that ...”

“... Eisenstein laid into rival claimants to a ‘materialist approach to form’ such as the Cine-Eye group led by Dziga Vertov. He complained that Vertov’s documentaries took from their surroundings ‘the things that impress him rather than the things with which, by impressing the audience, he will plough its psyche’. Documentary just wasn’t aggressive ...”

“... editor of the Burlington Magazine, perhaps best known for his scholarly work on the Bloomsbury Group, gives a detailed chronicle of the careers of the artists, whom he describes as loosely ‘entwined’ in a single history. He sees them, not so much as a ‘gang’, though that is how they are sometimes thought of, more as contributors to a loose art ...”

“... voted in favour of UN Resolution 660, which condemned the invasion of Kuwait ‘as a breach of international peace and security’. Hours later uniformed men confiscated our passports and told us we would be moved to another hotel as ‘guests of the president’. We learned later that the media had called us ‘human shield hostages’; apparently we were ...”

“... There was always at least one good piece in the Xinmin Weekly, published by the Shanghai media group, whose tabloid Xinmin Evening News was also much more popular than the Party broadsheet. I remember one cover story on the computer junk trade which described Chinese peasants breathing in toxic fumes as they dismantled mountains of VDUs and motherboards ...”

“... for the creation of a true United Nations force flying the blue flag and operating through an international chain of command. By failing to avail ourselves of that provision we created at least the appearance of a Pax Americana, since it was the United States rather than the Security Council which took the key decisions. Is the United States equipped to ...”

“... in April 1975 reads: ‘Given the purges, the mass killings, re-education camps and refugee crisis it bears asking if Ho Chi Minh’s vision of a unified Vietnam for the good of the Vietnamese people was achieved.’ ‘This is the United States Air Force’ (1968) by Văn Tho, at the Pritzker Military Museum Interspersed with what the curator ...”

“... Charles Wilson, who learned his trade on the news desk of the Daily Mail and left Murdoch’s News International to join Cap’n Bob as editor of Sporting Life. Mr Wilson has now re-surfaced as a senior panjandrum of the former Maxwell group, where he presumably had at least a small part in deciding whether the Sunday People ...”

“... DSO, saying in Our Falklands War: We were tasked to look for and find the General Belgrano Group. It was reported to consist of the cruiser and escorts. We located her on our passive sonar and sighted her visually early in the afternoon of 1 May. We took up a position astern, and followed the General Belgrano for over thirty hours. We reported we were ...”

“... Brezhnev kindly. At best, he is a pathetic figure with bushy eyebrows stumbling across the international scene, jovial but almost incoherent under the weight of tranquillisers, vodka and oncoming dementia. At worst, he is the man who unleashed the Warsaw Pact armies to overthrow the Prague Spring in 1968, who destabilised half the world by sending ...”

“... the party lists. Albayrak is minister of energy but is widely understood to be part of the small group that governs the country along with Erdoğan’s son Bilal and his daughter Sümeyye. The AKP provides the means for Erdoğan to manage parliament, mobilise voters and dispense favours in election campaigns, and develop cadres to fill the increasing number ...”

“... Horowitz is mired in past debates when he emphasises ‘the National Party’s advocacy of group rights’ or ‘reserved white seats’. The ruling party no longer bases its hopes on racial minority protection but on alliances with like-minded conservative forces across the racial divide –alliances which may well prove surprisingly successful once ...”

“... Mozambique. The campaign is patronised by many young right-wingers, including Marc Gordon of the International Freedom Foundation, an anti-communist organisation which enjoys extremist American funding. Like many Western ideologues who sup with the devil, Gordon has the long spoon of ignorance to hand: he has never set foot in Mozambique. In ...”