“... at all. The jacket of this paperback reprint of The Irony of American History carries a comment by Barack Obama which attempts a summary of Niebuhr: ‘There’s serious evil in the world, and hardship and pain. And we should be humble and modest in our belief we can eliminate those things.’ That is a fair digest considering that it was extracted by a ...”

“... the most high profile co-authored by John McCain, and with sponsors including Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. Although capping carbon has been an idea more strongly welcomed by the Democrats, Republican strategists will have noted that the announcement of the Californian scheme gave Governor Schwarzenegger’s poll ratings a healthy boost, helping him ...”

“... will be encouraged to invest in the refugee zones by ‘lobbying’ from such world leaders as Barack Obama. This points to an additional problem. Their proposal rests on bypassing an international system of refugee protection – which, for all its faults, at least sets universal standards – in favour of ad hoc arrangements based on the goodwill of ...”

“... is a tremendous appreciation for the leadership of Thein Sein and what he has done here,’ Barack Obama’s state department gofer on Burma, Derek Mitchell, said last month. Thein Sein became president in March last year, four months after a thuggishly rigged general election, the first since Aung San Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy won ...”

“... Barack Obama’s​ repeated insistence that Bashar al-Assad must leave office – and that there are ‘moderate’ rebel groups in Syria capable of defeating him – has in recent years provoked quiet dissent, and even overt opposition, among some of the most senior officers on the Pentagon’s Joint Staff ...”

“... campaign aired on CNN hails the ‘golden moment’ for ‘Remarkable Indonesia’. In 2010 Barack Obama triumphantly ‘returned’ to Jakarta, where he lived as a child, and made a rousing speech at the national university. The US agreed to sell air-to-surface missiles to the country’s military (after years of condemning its human rights ...”

“... about black people’, as Kanye West put it, the aftermath of the financial crisis showed that Barack Obama was keen not to be seen as caring too much about black people. The second black president lectured African Americans about individual responsibility while bailing out his future paymasters on Wall Street.The pandemic, which has killed 130,000 ...”

“... a series of blistering interviews on the state of Egyptian political life. Sounding rather like Obama in 2008, he insisted that he was ‘not a saviour’, that ‘only with the help of the people could he try to change the authoritarian regime in power for the last 50 years’. It’s easy to understand why Egyptians are tempted to see him as a saviour: an ...”

“... Many people in Washington were surprised when the Obama administration tapped Charles Freeman to chair the National Intelligence Council, the body that oversees the production of National Intelligence Estimates: Freeman had a distinguished 30-year career as a diplomat and Defense Department official, but he has publicly criticised Israeli policy and America’s special relationship with Israel, saying, for example, in a speech in 2005, that ‘as long as the United States continues unconditionally to provide the subsidies and political protection that make the Israeli occupation and the high-handed and self-defeating policies it engenders possible, there is little, if any, reason to hope that anything resembling the former peace process can be resurrected ...”

“... a cavalcade of black cars, stepped from his armoured limousine, strode up the stairs, and greeted Barack and Michelle Obama with a handshake and air kisses. Melania Trump caught up with her husband moments later, an unwieldy Tiffany-blue gift box in her gloved hands. Like numerous contemporary commentators, Plutarch of ...”

“... against right-wing revisionists, flew to Florida to help with the vote count in 2000 and adored Barack Obama. His fiction bore witness to the country’s slow corrosion. Updike’s first Harry ‘Rabbit’ Angstrom novel, Rabbit, Run (1960), is a study of youthful promise and energy ineluctably going to seed. It engendered a tetralogy, the Raj Quartet ...”

“... Democrat and Republican nominees for president he isn’t a meritocrat (Dukakis, the Clintons, Obama) or an aristocrat (the Bushes, Gore, Kerry), or the son of a powerful father (McCain, Romney, Trump). Not being an egghead is his biggest asset in the fight v. Trump. With his famous love for ‘the poorly educated’, Trump often seems to be campaigning on ...”

“... they had left behind with the end of the Cold War. The administrations of both George W. Bush and Barack Obama pressured countries not to enter into deals with Petrocaribe. In 2006, for instance, the State Department lobbied Haiti not to take a 25-year line of credit, financed at 1 per cent interest, to buy Venezuelan diesel and unleaded fuel, even ...”

“... space. In 2010, he announced that he would rather have Sarah Palin occupying the Oval Office than Barack Obama, and in the last election he kinda-sorta endorsed Donald Trump, which one might chalk up to perverse dotage (from Trilling to Trump, what a spiral) if it weren’t part of a decades-long pattern of hitching his cart to the most opprobrious ...”

“... being found are a bizarrely low 500 to 1. (Another 5000 to 1 bet offered by William Hill is that Barack Obama will play cricket for England. I’d advise against that punt.) Nonetheless, 5000 to 1 pales in comparison with the odds you would have got in 2008 on a future world in which Donald Trump was president, Theresa May was prime minister, Britain ...”