“... go by quite so fast. At the start of 2008, Gordon Brown was prime minister of the United Kingdom, George W. Bush was president of the United States, and only politics wonks had ever heard of the junior senator from Illinois; Nicolas Sarkozy was president of France, Hu Jintao was general secretary of the Chinese Communist ...”

“... debt. Appeals to the bankers are of no avail, just as calls to the Federal Reserve and the Bush Administration fail to produce a rescue. On 2 December 2001, Enron files for bankruptcy protection, at that point the largest US corporation ever to do so. Though caught up in the Internet boom, Enron was not a stereotypical dot.com, all hype and no ...”

“... on a mountain hillside, with ailing or dead parents, and suffering children, would you thank Mr Bush? I use his name generically for the British and Americans, and those Arabs who were swept along by us – initially, at any rate, against their better judgment – into a shooting war. The question is rhetorical. You would feel the kind of anger that the ...”

“... tried to browbeat a reluctant UN into giving the green light for the invasion of Iraq, President Bush warned the General Assembly that it ‘faced a difficult and defining moment’. The alternatives were to back the war or become as ‘irrelevant’ as the League of Nations. A week later, a gung-ho Donald Rumsfeld said that an unsupportive UN might ‘fall ...”

“... are remarks like ‘the golden rule is that there are no golden rules,’ made by people like George Bernard Shaw. The Yale Book lists these under the names of their authors, along with brief indications of their provenance and reliability. Books of quotations are no longer sources of things you might want to say or cite – after all, you can Google and ...”

“... broader nature of the terrible conflict with Japan’, and gone too ‘the multiple lessons we might hope to learn from it’. Dower predicted that when, in December 2001, we commemorated the 60th anniversary of the Pearl Harbor attack, we would see ‘again (with a ...”

“... assessment itself contained this crucial admission: ‘Judgments are not intended to imply that we have proof that shows something to be a fact. Assessments are based on collected information, which is often incomplete or fragmentary, as well as logic, argumentation and precedents.’ Yet the assessment has passed into the media imagination as if it were ...”

“... this; at the very least, a powerful degree of denial. If global warming is as much of a threat as we have good reason to think it is, the subject can’t be covered in the same way as church fêtes and county swimming championships. I suspect we’re reluctant to think about it because ...”

“... towards, the China of Jiang Zemin. The Clinton campaign of 1992 made quite a point of the Bush regime’s failure to respond to the Tiananmen massacre of 1989; there was much brave talk of ‘the butchers of Beijing’ and the Stalinist gerontocracy, and of the need to employ economic ‘leverage’ for human rights. In those days, the annual ...”

“... Six weeks​ after President George W. Bush launched what the White House called a Global War on Terror, in October 2001, the journalist Bob Woodward asked the vice president, Dick Cheney, when the war would end. ‘Not in our lifetime,’ Cheney said. One can picture his barely suppressed smirk, a facial tic familiar from interviews ...”

“... noble American sense of mission before he reluctantly took his country into the European war. ‘We are provincials no longer,’ he famously declared in his second inaugural address in March 1917. Though still publicly opposed to American intervention in the war, he insisted that ‘our own fortunes as a nation are involved whether ...”

“... Having grown up with an outspoken left-wing father who trod on toes in Cold War Australia (where we had our own HUAC equivalents in the form of Royal Commissions on espionage and communism), it seemed odd to me that Americans had so quickly forgotten their own experiences of the 1950s. Of course there is denunciation in Western democratic societies as well ...”

“... the streets, but they haven’t gone very far. Visiting dignitaries to the Green Zone, whether George Bush, Gordon Brown or Barack Obama, seldom realise the extent of the military operations required to protect them or the impact of these operations on Iraqis, and so get an exaggerated impression of the progress towards normality in Baghdad. Last ...”

“... and the EU sent them to fevered new heights. All this makes it hard to shake the feeling that we are living through a deranged re-run of the Cold War. Of course, the idea of a reprise of the superpower stand-off that dominated the 20th century has been in the air more or less since the actual Cold War ended, the stuff of countless think-tank briefings and ...”

“... democracy than the American-style ‘populism’ practised by politicians from Andrew Jackson to George W. Bush. The word populiste is a deadly insult, most recently deployed by socialists and Chiraquiens alike against anyone who dares interpret the result of the referendum on the European Constitution as a vote of no ...”