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“... enterprise begins in moral solipsism. Most accounts of the human rights industry – including Jonathan Power’s Like Water on Stone, the history of Amnesty International, timed for its 40th birthday this year – have a whiff of Whig history about them. It is hard for those driven by conviction and concern to imagine what it might be like for those ...”

“... In the spring​ of 1801 a young man called Hans Jonathan left the mansion in Copenhagen where he worked as a slave. Going for a walk was allowed: despite his status, he had a degree of autonomy within the walls of the city, then a thriving port with around one hundred thousand inhabitants. But this time he didn’t return ...”

“... which happiness could spring into sudden unexpected bloom, like a flower from the bare rock’. Jonathan Hunt, who is at work on a biography of Brooke, argues in his percipient preface to the Penguin edition that, for Brooke’s narrator as a child, the Orchis militaris ‘seems to embody all the desirable qualities of masculinity, which he feels he lacks ...”

“... It is a complex story to tell, since so many aspects must be considered. The erosion of Ming power took many years, and various Ming pretenders fought on, by land and sea, until the early 1660s. In central and north China rebel groups had chipped away at Ming power for decades, as the state gradually lost its ...”

“... too young to have known Sandino as anything but a legend. Yet it is this basic element which the power-brokers of the Reagan Administration cannot understand. The core of Sandinismo is not an ‘imported’ ideology, but its exact opposite: resistance to ‘exported’ foreign domination. Omar Cabezas’s vigorous, funny and self-deprecating account of his ...”

“... 14 February, is expected to be the most closely contested for 35 years or more. President Goodluck Jonathan and his People’s Democratic Party (PDP) are riding on the back of a decade of decent economic growth and there is evidence of better governance in some areas. Jonathan’s supporters claim that if he wins a second ...”

“... gathering at Paris was impressive by any standard. It also promised a more enlightened exercise of power than had been seen at Vienna in 1815, where restoration of the balance of power was the best that could be hoped for. The principle of self-determination would now at last be realised across Europe. This was not to be an ...”

“... original cast members) and the other three-quarters of the Beyond the Fringe team (Alan Bennett, Jonathan Miller and Dudley Moore), who would go on to present their own take on the nuclear threat, in a sketch called ‘Civil War’.In that sketch, a worried Moore listens trustingly as a succession of posh-voiced government spokesmen seek to reassure him that ...”

“... long road to nation-building. Kazakhstan was the last of the 15 republics to declare independence. Jonathan Aitken is an unlikely candidate to write a book on this subject. Since emerging from prison after his conviction for perjury in 1999 he has written books about himself and other public figures who fell from grace: Richard Nixon, his former special ...”

“... One evening, declares Jonathan Wordsworth as he begins his new critical book, a poet happened to be walking along a road, when the peasant who was with him pointed out a striking sight:         ’Twas a horse, that stood Alone upon a little breast of ground With a clear silver moonlight sky behind. With one leg from the ground the creature stood, Insensible and still; breath, motion gone, Hairs, colour, all but shape and substance gone, Mane, ears, and tail, as lifeless as the trunk That had no stir of breath ...”

“... principles and values, and that it did not have a cat in hell’s chance of achieving national power.’ Nonetheless, his idealism in other areas seems to have survived. Among the more revealing passages in this not particularly revealing book are those in which the author describes his schooldays, which was when he absorbed (from his headmaster) ‘a ...”

“... Listen to Jonathan Meades introduce and read this piece on the LRB PodcastAsneaked photograph​ from the earliest years of this century shows the teenage prodigy Wayne Rooney leading his parents out of the sea on a Mexican beach. They are about to move into an unknown world, where they will, all three, lurch from idolisation to easy prey, from objects of pity to mean-spirited envy – the adolescent has a gift, the elders have his blood ...”

“... book almost entirely. Each edition included a circle diagram describing the country’s centres of power and their relative significance. In 1962, most of the circles represented conventional institutions, the largest being industry and the civil service. But by 2004, two circles were much larger than the others: media and ‘the rich’. If Sampson were ...”

“... era defined by simple men of crude force like General Grant and, later, Teddy Roosevelt. The money power was rampant; no one valued ‘trained statesmen’. One theme of the Education is that the juggernaut of government, and its temptations and pressures, ruin all who seize power: ‘the distortion of sight – the warping ...”

“... since he was a student: philosophical rationality together with revolutionary zeal and popular power. Clutching the unfinished manuscript of his concluding paragraphs, he went off to gaze at the world-historical phenomenon. ‘I saw the Emperor,’ he wrote: ‘this world-soul, riding out of the city on reconnaissance; it is indeed a wonderful sensation to ...”