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“... Te Deum, which because of the terrible heat wafted fitfully around the arena; the flag of the new commonwealth was hoisted, and the artillery thundered and cheer after cheer ran around the great arena.’ You don’t need the stylistic scrupulousness of Turgenev to see that the use of the word ‘great’, if it was intended to offset the repetition of the ...”

“... teaching career began soon after: first, as a junior research fellow at the Institute of Commonwealth Studies in London; and, subsequently, as a research officer in the International Labour Office at Geneva and a Ford Foundation research fellow at the Centre for International and Area Studies at the University of ...”

“... The theme​ of the latest Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting (it was meant to take place in June but has been postponed because of Covid-19) is ‘Delivering a Common Future: Connecting, Innovating, Transforming’. It is to be held in Kigali, hosted by Paul Kagame, Rwanda’s president for the last two decades: proof enough of his continued good standing in the West ...”

“... remained the gist of the objection to them by British policy-makers (the people at the Foreign Office, for example); together with the fact that, as they knew full well, but didn’t always let on, Britain’s legal title to the islands was highly dubious. It was anomalous that they remained colonies (or ‘overseas dependencies’) long after ...”

“... revenue from crude oil, currently estimated at $11 billion a year (90 per cent of the country’s foreign exchange earnings), is entirely in the hands of the Western multinationals – Agip, BP, Chevron, Exxon, Shell, Texaco, Total – who between them operate the existing fields and prospect for new ones. Other resources – cashew ...”

“... arms salesmen. This time Aitken comes clean. In his book’s acknowledgments he thanks the Kazakh foreign ministry for free hotel accommodation and Sir Richard Evans, the former chairman of BAE Systems, for several free plane rides around Kazakhstan. (Evans was hired by Nazarbayev to sort out the national airline and was later given control of Samruk, a state ...”

“... rebel leader of anti-Vichy forces in London and Algiers, and then, between 1946 and his return to office in 1958, as a brooding absence in French political life. Removing himself from view the better to be seen was both a tactic and a strategy, as Sudhir Hazareesingh argues in a fascinating study of the De Gaulle myth. He might sweep up his papers and stride ...”

“... new players. The City of Manchester Stadium, built with £127 million of public money for the 2002 Commonwealth Games in the poorest part of town, has been renamed the Etihad Stadium, after the Abu Dhabi airline which pays lavishly for the privilege. The executives appointed by the new regime have been diligent in expressing their respect for the club’s ...”

“... except as a source of patronage, and thus preferred to stay on the hacienda rather than in the office.2. A very powerful bicameral, single district/single representative Congress, recruited from a restricted, property-based electorate (as late as 1940 less than 14 per cent of voting-age Filipinos were actually voting) and ‘organised’ through a ...”

“... away, Yeltsin simply stepped onto the top of the pyramid. The chronicle of his first year in office is not bad, though it has darkened since the brilliant flash that marked the failure of the Coup. The ending of Communist rule was more unequivocally a good thing than the ending of the Soviet Union, though the two could not in practice be separated: the ...”

“... dominance: as Browning was to put it, ‘the man Clive – he fought Plassey, spoiled the clever/foreign game,/Conquered and annexed and Englished!’ This image of ‘the game’, which seems so quintessentially Kiplingesque, was already well established in proto-imperial relations, and was to appear during Burke’s management of the attempted impeachment ...”

“... after independence, its absorption of princely states a ‘stupendous achievement’, its foreign policy ‘a staggering performance’. Nehru himself, ‘in the hearts and minds of his countrymen’, is ‘George Washington, Lincoln, Roosevelt and Eisenhower rolled into one’.All countries have fond images of themselves, and big ...”

“... Game” ’. All these years later, Steele has still failed to winkle any more details out of the Foreign Office – but then again, those other celebrity spies, Malcolm Muggeridge and Graham Greene, were equally close-lipped about what they actually did in the war. Shipton’s job, whatever it was, ended in October 1942. He walked out again, and in ...”

“... countryside, seaside holidays and an unparalleled tradition of Parliamentary government. To entice foreign visitors, four London buses made a promotional tour of the Continent. The lead bus, which sported a giant Union Jack, broadcast a continuous recording of ‘God Save the King’ and other patriotic anthems. ‘Not surprisingly’, Richard Weight remarks ...”

“... neo-Soviet populists who propagate the false notion of the USSR as a paradisiac Russian-speaking commonwealth, benignly ruled from Moscow, a natural continuum of the tsarist empire, disturbed only by Nazi invaders to whom ‘the west’ are heirs and the only obstacle to its re-creation. If you were born after 1985 you have no remembered reality to measure ...”