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William Davies: Politics on Speed, 7 May 2026

Hyperpolitics: Extreme Politicisation without Political Consequences 
by Anton Jäger.
Verso, 108 pp., £11.99, February, 978 1 83674 207 4Show More
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“... authority could now be acquired by those with a public status outside mainstream politics, as Hillary Clinton was shocked to discover in 2016. In the 2010s career politicians lost out to a series of entrepreneurs, comedians, TV stars and previously peripheral political figures such as Corbyn. In the background, Jäger argues, was an increasing ...”

Whose century?

Adam Tooze: After the Shock, 30 July 2020

Schism: China, America and the Fracturing of the Global Trading System 
by Paul Blustein.
McGill-Queen’s, 356 pp., £27.99, September 2019, 978 1 928096 85 6Show More
Superpower Showdown: How the Battle between Trump and Xi Threatens a New Cold War 
by Bob Davis and Lingling Wei.
Harper, 480 pp., £25, June 2020, 978 0 06 295305 6Show More
Trade Wars Are Class Wars: How Rising Inequality Distorts the Global Economy and Threatens International Peace 
by Matthew C. Klein and Michael Pettis.
Yale, 288 pp., £20, June 2020, 978 0 300 24417 5Show More
The New Class War: Saving Democracy from the Metropolitan Elite 
by Michael Lind.
Atlantic, 224 pp., £14.99, February 2020, 978 1 78649 955 4Show More
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“... reassessment of US-China relations began nearly ten years ago, during Obama’s first term, when Hillary Clinton was secretary of state. Clinton had taken a close interest in Chinese affairs as far back as the 1990s, when she was first lady. In 2011, as secretary of state, she initiated the pivot to Asia of the ...”

Regime Change in the West?

Perry Anderson, 3 April 2025

“... compensatory, offering side-payments to the poor that the disciplinary variant withholds, as with Clinton or Blair. Both versions, however, have been unswervingly committed to furthering the common objective of fortifying capital against any untoward shocks.Neoliberalism, as I have said, forms an international regime: that is, not just a system replicated ...”

Washed White

Michael Rogin, 10 June 1993

The Rites of Assent: Transformations in the Symbolic Construction of America 
by Sacvan Bercovitch.
Routledge, 424 pp., £40, November 1992, 9780415900140Show More
Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words that Remade America 
by Garry Wills.
Simon and Schuster, 315 pp., £17.99, April 1993, 0 671 76956 1Show More
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“... and while racism that undergirded the Reagan/Bush regime. Garry Wills is a partisan of Bill and Hillary Rodham Clinton. Lincoln at Gettysburg is authentic history, and also political allegory. Speaking to the present, it wishes that nationalism and war had not been the instruments of ending slavery, that words (and ...”

Mishal’s Luck

Adam Shatz: The Plot against Hamas, 14 May 2009

Kill Khalid: The Failed Mossad Assassination of Khalid Mishal and the Rise of Hamas 
by Paul McGeough.
Quartet, 477 pp., £25, May 2009, 978 0 7043 7157 6Show More
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“... the old fantasy of the Israeli right. Refusing to speak to Netanyahu, he placed a call to Clinton. ‘If Mishal dies, peace dies with him,’ Hussein warned. The embassy would be stormed, the Israelis in Jordanian custody would hang, and relations would be broken off. Clinton agreed to pressure the Israelis to hand ...”

Competition is for losers

David Runciman: Silicon Valley Vampire, 23 September 2021

The Contrarian: Peter Thiel and Silicon Valley’s Pursuit of Power 
by Max Chafkin.
Bloomsbury, 400 pp., £25, September 2021, 978 1 5266 1955 6Show More
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“... together. The fact that almost every West Coast attendee bar Thiel himself had been batting for Hillary Clinton added to the sense of playacting: ‘the greatest liberals in the history of the world here’, Trump said of his guests at one point, with some irony and more than a hint of menace. He heaped praise on Thiel, whom he called ‘a really ...”

The President and the Bomb

Adam Shatz, 16 November 2017

“... he wouldn’t consider using nuclear weapons against Pakistan at a presidential debate in 2008, Hillary Clinton scolded him: ‘I don’t believe any president should make blanket statements with regard to use or non-use.’ The right to annihilate one’s enemies (or frenemies, as in the case of Pakistan) is a right no American leader can afford to ...”

What did happen?

David Edgar: Ukraine, 21 January 2016

The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine 
by Serhii Plokhy.
Allen Lane, 381 pp., £25, December 2015, 978 0 241 18808 8Show More
In Wartime: Stories from Ukraine 
by Tim Judah.
Allen Lane, 256 pp., £20, January 2016, 978 0 241 19882 7Show More
Ukraine Crisis: What It Means for the West 
by Andrew Wilson.
Yale, 236 pp., £12.99, October 2014, 978 0 300 21159 7Show More
Frontline Ukraine: Crisis in the Borderlands 
by Richard Sakwa.
I.B. Tauris, 297 pp., £9.99, January 2015, 978 1 78453 527 8Show More
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“... borders. Despite the ‘reset’ of American-Russian relations under the Obama administration, Hillary Clinton in particular took a hawkishly combative attitude to Russia, defining its actions in Georgia (and later Crimea) as aggression, rather than ‘defensive reactions to perceived challenges’. By 2014, the demonisation of Putin had poisoned ...”

The bullet mistakenly came out of the gun

Jack Shenker: The Age of Sisi, 30 November 2017

The Queue 
by Basma Abdel Aziz, translated by Elisabeth Jaquette.
Melville House, 220 pp., £10.99, June 2016, 978 0 9934149 0 9Show More
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“... did with Mubarak (‘I really consider President and Mrs Mubarak to be friends of my family,’ Hillary Clinton gushed as secretary of state in 2009), Sisi’s Western sponsors have continued to cleave to him. Fresh out of khakis, he is a familiar face in an ever more unfamiliar region, and one that foreign ministries and intelligence operatives ...”

Wrecking Ball

Adam Shatz: Trump’s Racism, 7 September 2017

“... year’s election, a flagrant attempt to suppress the vote among blacks and Latinos who supported Hillary Clinton. Trump’s attacks on Muslims, undocumented immigrants and other non-white people were portrayed by some members of the press during the campaign as a kind of rhetorical extravagance: the lurid expression, like his tower and his casinos, of a ...”

The Political Economy of Carbon Trading

Donald MacKenzie: A Ratchet, 5 April 2007

“... in the United States. That the sulphur dioxide market was, broadly, a success shaped the way the Clinton administration approached the negotiations that led to the 1997 Kyoto Protocol. In the protocol, the industrialised nations undertook that by Kyoto’s 2008-12 ‘commitment period’ they would have limited their greenhouse-gas emissions to agreed ...”

The Impermanence of Importance

David Runciman: Obama, 2 August 2018

The World as It Is: Inside the Obama White House 
by Ben Rhodes.
Bodley Head, 450 pp., £20, June 2018, 978 1 84792 517 6Show More
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“... dark days that followed Trump’s election victory in 2016, he falls back on basketball to explain Hillary Clinton’s failure to convert. Rhodes writes: ‘He talked about what it took to win the presidency. To win, he told us, you have to have a core reason why you’re running, and you need to make it clear to everyone how much you want to win. “You ...”

Flailing States

Pankaj Mishra: Anglo-America Loses its Grip, 16 July 2020

“... Reagan’s dog-whistles about ‘welfare queens’, and then came under intensive attack by Bill Clinton, America’s ‘first black president’. An approving chorus was provided by the New Republic, once the main organ of American progressivism, as well as the National Review and the New York Times. After the collapse of communism, and the moral challenge ...”

Reflections on the Independence Referendum

“... decaying British state and reduce its efficacy as a US vassal. Hence the appeals from Obama and Hillary Clinton to vote ‘No’, a sentiment Blair fully shares but dare not admit to, fearing that his intervention might tip the balance in the opposite direction. There is no issue of principle here, just imperial interests. The US accelerated the ...”

Money as Weapon

Christopher de Bellaigue, 14 April 2011

“... that it will have to happen, and that even the US top brass, including Petraeus, recognise it. Hillary Clinton signalled a major U-turn when she dropped her insistence that the Taliban renounce violence, sever its links with al-Qaida and accept the Afghan constitution before negotiations can begin. It’s a prospect that some Afghans view with ...”
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