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“... Part​ of what makes Owen Jones such a phenomenally successful figure by left-of-Labour standards is his ability to be several things at once. He is both insider, reporting back to ‘us’ about what ‘they’ think, and outsider, as shocked and angry about it as ‘we’ might be. He was brought up in Sheffield, Falkirk and Stockport and speaks in a sharp Mancunian accent, but he is also an Oxford graduate, with all the connections that can entail ...”

“... In​ 1970 the Labour MP for Morpeth, Will Owen, was charged with being an agent of the StB, Czechoslovakia’s secret service. The man who had named him was Josef Frolik, a Czechoslovak defector, who said Owen was on a £500 monthly retainer organised by Robert Husak, another intelligence officer at the Czechoslovak embassy in London ...”

“... Where they primarily document the project’s disintegration between the 2017 and 2019 elections, Owen Jones describes the emergence of Corbynism from the exhausted managerialism of late New Labour, gives a defence of its politics and examines its weaknesses. Both books will be painful and often infuriating reading for anyone who was at all sympathetic ...”

“... In thinking about how we got here, Srnicek and Williams – like so many recent writers, from Owen Jones to Mark Fisher to Philip Mirowski – lay great stress on the think-tanks (the Mont Pelerin Society and the like) that had their solutions ready when Keynesianism faltered in the mid-1970s. The ‘folk politics’ of Climate Camps, single-issue ...”

“... finally to stunned resignation. A scattering of dissident voices on the payroll – Seumas Milne, Owen Jones, Zoe Williams, George Monbiot – were drowned out by a host of detractors, from within the paper and without: Tim Bale, Nick Cohen, Anne Perkins, Michael White, Martin Kettle, Peter Hain, Alan Johnson, Tony Blair (twice), Jonathan ...”

“... opportunity to end its civil war. In Bosnia some of the political groundwork has been done by Lord Owen and Cyrus Vance. But it’s been futile without military commitment. Since the Bosnian Serbs and Croats view the UN forces in Bosnia with contempt, they have felt no need to make any serious political commitments or compromises. Western policy not only lacks ...”

“... The thrice-weekly flights of Romania’s national airline Tarom from Bucharest to London have an atmosphere all their own. In the bleak waiting-room, most of the passengers stand and settle in for the inevitable delay. The room contains a few Romanians excited to be on their way to Western Europe and many more West Europeans delighted to be on their way back to civilisation as they know it ...”

“... Same brothel, different whores’: the words chosen by Valentin Gabrielescu of the re-created National Peasants’ Party to express his opinion of Romania’s provisional government, the National Salvation Front. And he’s by no means alone in distrusting Romania’s new rulers. From the lunch tables of the elegantly-appointed restaurant in the Writers’ Union to the raucous student meetings all over Bucharest, the Front, as it calls itself, attracts puzzled enquiry, suspicion and, as often as not, angry derision ...”

“... Should​ women carry out knife attacks? In the September issue of its Inspire Guide, al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula argued against it. In October an article in the Islamic State publication Rumiyah (‘Rome’) took the opposite view. Having discussed possible targets – ‘a drunken kafir on a quiet road returning home after a night out, or an average kafir working his night shift’ – the magazine praised three women who, on 11 September, were shot dead as they stabbed two officers in a Mombasa police station ...”

“... Jeremy Greenstock​ was the UK ambassador to the United Nations during the run-up to the invasion of Iraq and then the special envoy for Iraq, based in Baghdad during the occupation. Obviously he wrote his memoirs with a view to having them published. Mistakes had been made in Iraq and there was public interest in what knowledgeable insiders had to say about them ...”

“... of the three-volume Myvyrian Archaiology of Wales (completed in 1807 and named for its sponsor Owen Jones, aka Owain Myfyr) with his many interpolations into the genuinely ancient ‘Triads of the Island of Britain’. His forgeries – for there is no doubt about his literary talent – were only slowly unravelled. Even more significant, though, is ...”

“... For forty years after the Second World War, the Swiss had every reason to believe that theirs was the optimal form of government. There was political and social stability, full employment, virtually no crime and, for a time, the highest per capita income in the world. Switzerland’s system of government with its many celebrated peculiarities was not only unique but uniquely successful ...”

“... There is​ a sentence in Jonathan Powell’s Talking to Terrorists: How to End Armed Conflicts that raises intriguing questions about how the Northern Ireland peace process got underway.* ‘Martin McGuinness,’ Powell writes, ‘still denies sending the message stating that “our war is over” which started the correspondence with John Major, and it is pretty clear in retrospect that one of the intermediaries in the chain between the government and the IRA did in fact embellish the message ...”

“... In​ 2017 an article in the North Wales edition of the Daily Post headlined ‘How Eviction and the Building of Beaumaris Castle Led to the Creation of Newborough’ claimed that the village came into being ‘after native men and women were kicked out of their homes to make way for one of Edward I’s imposing ring of castles’. It may have happened seven hundred years ago, but it still grates ...”