“... the Olympics. This particular visionary wrote to Ronald Reagan that he loved America ‘because we have about two hundred flavours of ice cream’. ‘That’s America,’ the President observed. ‘Everyone with his or her vision of the American promise.’ The charm of the anecdote was its complete vacuousness: no tale of harrowing escape, no Horatio ...”

“... In the final year of the last century, George Stephanopoulos, Bill Clinton’s one-time aide and press secretary, published a memoir of his time in the White House entitled All Too Human: A Political Education. Back then, it seemed like a terribly exciting book: 1999 was the year of Clinton’s Senate trial, following his impeachment, and also of the first appearance on US television of The West Wing, which offered the fantasy of a different kind of liberal president ...”

“... mission to bring democracy to the world’s benighted. In The Fight Is for Democracy (2003), George Packer argued that a ‘vibrant, hardheaded liberalism’ could use the American military to promote its values. The subtitle of The Good Fight (2006) by Peter Beinart, the then editor of the New Republic, insisted ‘Why Liberals – and Only Liberals ...”

“... exemplifies the rise of the idea of freedom as a white prerogative. It’s also the birthplace of George Wallace, one of the most influential political figures of the 20th century, who struck electoral gold by claiming that an alliance of the federal government and the civil rights movement was undermining the freedom of whites. Cowie uses Barbour to describe ...”

“... was seeking to recover from genocide when some rivers in Oxfordshire had burst their banks. How we laughed. This is governmental politics in action: poisonous, hypocritical, fatuous and absurd. It is hardly surprising that many of those with the most direct interest in helping countries like Rwanda would prefer it if politicians like Cameron kept away. He ...”

“... course of action in Somalia, and as one person involved in the mission planning put it, “We didn’t capture him because it would have been hard to find a place to put him.”’ In other words, the administration doubled-down on what look suspiciously like extrajudicial executions, faute de mieux, after shuttering ...”

“... whose appetite for wars can only frustrate Trump’s announced purpose to withdraw from the wars we are already in. The extent to which this president understands so basic a fact about a government he nominally leads is hard to gauge. But in the Trump presidency so far, the underlying condition is chaos – renewable by whim, chance or microscopic ...”

“... It was front-page news in the United States recently when George Bush brushed away a tear as he described how he had wept while deciding to unleash the air war in the Gulf last January. ‘Like a lot of people, I’ve worried a little bit about shedding tears in public or the emotion of it,’ he told a convention of Southern Baptists in June, but ‘as Barbara and I prayed at Camp David before the air war began, we were thinking about those young men and women overseas ...”

“... the self-styled postmodernist liberal, felt able to pronounce that cruelty was ‘the worst thing we do’. Torture has posed a problem for philosophers. Simple utilitarianism has notorious difficulties in explaining why torture or other such abuse is bad in principle. The felicific calculus may well favour lynching an innocent man, if a crazed mob is gagging ...”

“... periods and parts of the globe. Underpinning the concept, developed by its enterprising publisher George Weidenfeld, was the French idea of civilisation as encompassing material life and economies, ideas and mentalities, science and the arts, alongside the politics, revolutions and wars that were the traditional subjects of history.Unesco scored a far greater ...”

“... recent parade of Art Nouveau exhibitions was its strong echo in the present: an intuition that we live in another era of blurred disciplines, of objects treated as mini-subjects, of total design, of a ‘Style 2000’. Adolf Loos, the Viennese architect of austere façades, was the great critic of the aesthetic hybridity of Art Nouveau. He was to ...”

“... war may break out at any moment’. A few days later, President Trump told Reuters that ‘we could end up having a major, major conflict with North Korea.’ American atmospheric scientists have shown that even a relatively contained nuclear war would throw up enough soot and debris to threaten the global population: ‘A regional war between India ...”

“... At the height of the ‘warrantless wiretapping’ scandal of 2006 – George W. Bush had authorised the National Security Agency to monitor overseas phone calls involving suspected al-Qaida operatives, but it transpired that the surveillance extended to all electronic communication and web activity, foreign and domestic – Sherry Turkle went to a party celebrating the Webby Awards ...”

“... watching a whole movie and thinking only about the credits that are going to roll at the end,’ we’re told in The Anthologist (2009). ‘It’s a mistake of emphasis.’ When Baker was starting out, his good cheer was a clue that he wasn’t a programmatic avant-gardist, though it took a while for everyone to notice. In U&I (1991), his witty exploration ...”

“... who, as a civilian, probably read comic books. The truth, though, is that when, at age 12, we began seriously reading them (Marvel’s were the only good ones, unmistakably) my friend Karl and I disliked and distrusted the omnipresent Spider-Man. This was in 1976, three or four years after the lecture from the day-care instructor, and ...”