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“... gave rise to popular expectations that found expression in the institutions created by the new Commonwealth. A sparsely populated country rich in natural resources had to be secured from its northern neighbours – thus the White Australia Policy, pro-natalist measures (including a maternity allowance, or ‘baby bonus’) and compulsory military ...”

“... with 1906 and 1945 as one of the three great moments of the century. This cannot be the case in foreign affairs. Edward Heath is the only prime minister to have questioned Churchill’s belief that Britain was where three circles met, the Atlantic, Europe and the Commonwealth, and had unique authority in the ...”

“... Cicero’s moment of triumph in 63 BC, when, as a man who could boast no ancestors who had held office in the Capitol, he achieved the highest office. No ‘new man’ had reached the consulship for thirty years. Cicero’s sensitivity to aristocratic snobbery, his bitterness at the reluctance of those he now felt to be ...”

“... the Habyarimana regime, Christophe Mfizi, who had been the head of the government’s propaganda office in Kigali. As he later explained, he was anxious to avoid a libel suit. So he used ‘Zero’ as a way of fingering Agathe Habyarimana’s brother, Protais Zigiranyirazo, the prefect of Ruhengeri, the presidential family’s home province. Without giving ...”

“... Edgar Snow, the famous American foreign correspondent, once asked Mao Tse-tung for his appraisal of the social implications of the French Revolution. Mao reflected a while and then, shaking his head, said: ‘I think it’s still a bit too early to tell.’ The late Chinese leader’s caution might seem excessive even to the most obsessive historians ...”

“... imperial, economic and party-political. With Dominion governments asserting greater autonomy, the Commonwealth seemed about to dissolve from a British-led international entity into a loose collection of separate states. In India an imperial nightmare was being enacted as Gandhi’s civil disobedience campaign provoked widespread disregard for British ...”

“... and the world, did not realise that Israel was a nuclear power. His worries about Israel’s foreign policy, and the maniacal raid on the Lebanon, led him to reflect on the likelihood that Israel might one day soon use these monstrous weapons. The argument of the ‘deterrent’, deployed so effectively to take the sting from the disarmament movement in ...”

“... class, he acquired his patrician frame of mind from his time first at Cambridge and then at the Foreign Office, where he served in the 1920s and 1930s before joining the Times. Before the First World War, no one from his background could have hoped for a diplomatic career, but the deaths of the sons of the aristocracy in the trenches produced an acute ...”

“... Gore’s campaign was timid and bungling, but in any case he won the election and was only denied office by wholesale Republican electoral fraud in Florida and by the scandalously partisan Supreme Court decision that ended the recount there. Yet Nader is a convenient target. His ideological rigidity, his insistence that there was no difference between ...”

“... community affected seems to have been mobilised. Sympathy for this opposition extended to local office-holders, resulting in the heavy-handed intervention of the central government. Moreover, resistance to drainage was based not on blind conservatism but on the practical truth that all the projects served the interests of the projectors at the expense of ...”

“... 5 per cent of whom were African American), Britain saw an influx of troops from the empire and the Commonwealth, including half a million Canadians and tens of thousands from Australia, New Zealand and the West Indies; a quarter of a million Irish; a similar number of fighters from Poland, France and Czechoslovakia; approximately 150,000 refugees from across ...”

“... winded (Peter Beck, Guardian, 26 July, has since I wrote this revealed that the review was a Foreign Office plant and that ‘C.D.’ was Sir Cecil Hurst, the Foreign Office’s chief legal adviser. Corps Diplomatique?). According to D.C., ‘although the reader may, on closing the book, ask himself what is ...”

“... the invasion of Iraq began, in March 2003, the 30-year-old Stewart sent his résumé in to the Foreign Office but got no reply; undaunted, he set off for Baghdad to ask for a job directly. He landed the position of deputy governor for the southern province of Maysan, on the Iran-Iraq border, where he would spend six months before shifting to the ...”

“... is perceptibly the same man who attacked the Royal Titles Bill for recognising republics inside a Commonwealth that was no longer called ‘British’, who fought a sustained campaign against British membership of the European Community that became all the more intense as people declined to embrace its rationale and who set out with bleak, relentless logic ...”

“... for the German occupation. In Rome, unemployed workers looted shops and attacked the 74-year-old foreign minister, Carlo Sforza. It seemed that Europe – exhausted, divided and hungry – was on the verge of succumbing to another political catastrophe, only this time the threat came not from Fascism but from the Soviet Union. By 1949, however, the disaster ...”