“... first used by journalists in the mid-1970s, haunted American politics for decades afterwards. Bill Clinton’s campaign promise in 1992 to ‘end welfare as we know it’ marked the full convergence of neoliberalism with neoconservativism. Even before inflation brought fresh opprobrium down on welfare spending, one policy pioneer was already seeking ...”

“... this thing off.He did imagine it, though. And when he did pull it off – by first beating Hillary Clinton (‘I didn’t see how she could close America’s political divide’) to the Democratic nomination and then defeating John McCain in the presidential election – he felt he had proved something both about himself and his country. ‘My having been ...”

“... his New Conservative baedeker, The Rise of a Counter-Establishment, the pundit-turned-Clinton-consultant Sidney Blumenthal describes Ronald Reagan as the ultimate expression of Popular Front corniness.) Yet however bogus or middlebrow the results may have been, the Popular Front generated a popular culture – which was an alternative to ...”

“... of citizens and the legitimation of torture as a military tactic. To warriors against terror, the Bill of Rights had become ‘quaint’, as Bush’s attorney general, Alberto Gonzales, said of the Geneva Conventions.The hysteria provoked by the attacks on the World Trade Center created an opportunity for Cheney and his ideological comrades to engineer what ...”

“... could not himself be called on to testify at a trial. Until his last months in office, President Clinton was more parsimonious in granting pardons than any president since John Adams two hundred years earlier. But he made up for this at the end when he cast aside the ordinary process for handling federal clemency applications and, in the words of the ...”

“... words, but because of the singers’ lifestyle. And beware of politicians (like Tony Blair and Bill Clinton) who play musical instruments. Contemporary readers would be sensitive to the political aspects of Plato’s decision. Athenian tragedy and comedy were intensely democratic institutions, not only in the way they were organized, but also in their ...”

“... it funds elections, she doesn’t think it’ll be able to fix much else. In 2008, before Hillary Clinton lost the Democratic nomination to Obama, a conservative group called Citizens United (it describes itself as ‘an organisation dedicated to restoring our government to citizens’ control’) produced Hillary: The Movie, a ninety-minute profile of a ...”

“... Panetta, Michael Morell, John Brennan. We already have the memoir of the current CIA director, Bill Burns, but not that of his predecessor, Gina Haspel. Perhaps it would be too torture-heavy to be published.Catherine Ashton’s memoir offers neither brutal candour nor aristocratic irony. Instead, she aspires to sincerity. Ashton, like Pompeo, wasn’t a ...”

“... of eroding democratic freedoms at home. Peter GeogheganOn  7 March,​  the Economic Crime Bill was rushed through Parliament in a single day with cross-party support. The legislation, drafted in 2018, had been hastily updated to include new sanctions in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Boris Johnson said the ...”

“... c.2952), where Alice Munro was born in 1931, and twenty miles to the south, another tiny town: Clinton (population c.3240), where Munro has lived for the past thirty years with her second husband. Munro seems from the outset to have had little doubt that she would be the heroine of her life. The first of her parents’ three children (the second was born ...”

“... who were the modern dog’s makers’: muscular, energetic, eccentric, polymathic. Kathleen Pelham-Clinton, the Duchess of Newcastle, who imported the borzoi breed from Russia into Britain, met her husband, the seventh duke, at a dog show; she was exhibiting her fox terriers and he was competing with his Clumber spaniels, named after his estate in ...”

“... Massachusetts and Congressman John Conyers of Michigan, a veteran of the Korean War, introduced a bill to prevent Trump from launching a strike against North Korea without a congressional declaration of war. But the ‘No Unconstitutional Strike against North Korea’ bill has only 61 backers in the House, and it’s hard ...”

“... up zones of influence – a version of the principle still applies today. In 1940, William ‘Wild Bill’ Donovan, the head of the OSS, the wartime intelligence agency that preceded the CIA, visited Britain. The British wanted American money, radios and boats. Donovan’s visit led to the ‘destroyers for bases’ deal, under which Britain received American ...”

“... the efficacy of that elite in the future. This is a truly bipartisan cause. The Reagan years saw Bill Casey run riot at the CIA, often with more than a hundred covert operations going on simultaneously around the world. Much of what occurred in those years was disgraceful, and only a fraction of it has come out. You might have thought ...”

“... For an old Red like me, bowed down by years of Thatcher, Reagan, Clinton and Blair, these two books are full of exhilaration and hope. George Monbiot writes mainly about Britain in a terse investigative style that I had feared was out of date. Naomi Klein, based in Canada, ranges all over the world and writes infectiously with verve and passion ...”