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“... In 1905 a British journalist called James Dodds Henry travelled to Baku, an enclave on the southern frontier of the Russian Empire that had recently become the centre of the world oil industry. ‘If oil is king, Baku is its throne,’ he wrote in Baku: An Eventful History. But the Russian industry was even then beginning a precipitous decline following a series of crippling strikes in the oilfields led by a young Joseph Stalin, and rebellion was spreading across the Caucasus ...”

“... Steve Coll’s book tells two stories: a big one about how the bin Laden family cashed in on the oil bonanza in Saudi Arabia, and a smaller one about Osama’s role in the family business before he turned to holy warfare. Although well written, lucid and packed with useful detail, The Bin Ladens doesn’t establish much of a connection between the family firm in Saudi Arabia and Osama bin Laden’s jihad in Afghanistan, Yemen, Sudan and America, except that oil wealth funded both ...”

“... Robert Vitalis​ tells a great story about how he came to write this book. Some years ago, sitting in the Clark University library avoiding grading his students’ final exams, he pulled an old history of the university off the shelf. Clark played a key role in the birth of the field of international relations in the two decades before the First World War, he read, especially by founding and supporting one of the new discipline’s flagship journals, the Journal of Race Development ...”

“... recipients are now well trained. Which is why America’s Kingdom comes as a pleasant surprise. Robert Vitalis, who teaches political science at the University of Pennsylvania, has produced a scholarly and readable book on the interaction between Saudi society and Aramco, the US oil giant that had its beginnings when the Saudi government granted its ...”

“... to solder their cause together with appeals to colour-blind communism and pan-Africanism. As Robert Vitalis notes in his book White World Order, Black Power Politics, Black Internationalism was born alongside the white chauvinist version of international relations at the end of the 19th century, when ‘international relations meant race ...”

“... some of these magnates (Ralph of Burgundy, Hugh Capet’s great-uncle Odo and his grandfather Robert I) were elected king. When the direct line of Carolingians came to an end with the death of the young Louis V in 987, the claims of his uncle, Charles of Lorraine, were contested by Hugh Capet, count of Paris.Hugh’s success owed much to the support of ...”

“... of Recent Events’. Others were written much later, like the 12th-century accounts of Orderic Vitalis, William of Malmesbury, ‘Florence’ of Worcester and the detailed account of the battle of Stamford Bridge written in the 13th century by the Icelander Snorri Sturluson as part of The Saga of Haraldr Hardrádi; Wood keeps quoting this, though with ...”

“... Senlac, taken by Freeman from the later but richly detailed account of the Anglo-Norman Orderic Vitalis. We may even glimpse the stakes of the defensive ‘palisade’ recorded in the yet later but even richer verse romance by Wace (also credited by Freeman though scornfully demolished by Round). The English ‘state’ was eminently capable of organising ...”