“... proved short-lived – as Cole and Dempsey show, they were significantly undermined by Reagan and Clinton – they have come to stand for the larger culture of freedom that conservatives have loathed and liberals have loved for years. Conservatives in America generally don’t talk about terrorism’s root causes, but they make one exception in their wish to ...”

“... doctors, and – most troublesome of all – win the backing of a sceptical Cabinet. The NHS Bill received Royal Assent on 6 November 1946. The doctors, outraged at Bevan’s proposals, channelled their opposition through a profoundly reactionary BMA. Webster’s account of all this is sketchy, perhaps because he has covered the ground in previous ...”

“... Not why would anyone want to see Obama elected president rather than John McCain (or Hillary Clinton for that matter), but why would anyone who desired that outcome think that his or her individual vote could make the slightest difference in helping to bring it about? General elections are never decided by a single vote, so no one’s vote is ever going ...”

“... soon fall. Regime change in Baghdad would then follow. ‘I spoke to Obama, Petraeus, Biden and Clinton,’ Maliki says, ‘but they all thought Bashar would only last two or three months.’ He says he tried to negotiate with Sunni leaders in western Iraq, but they believed that their moment had come. ‘Negotiations failed,’ he says. ‘Their slogans ...”

“... of Joe Biden, Richard Holbrooke and Obama himself. Despite Flynn’s later contempt for Hillary Clinton – he led the chants of ‘lock her up’ at the Republican National Convention – she was well liked by McChrystal’s aides because she ‘had Stan’s back’. Many in JSOC never forgave the Obama administration for this slight against a commander ...”

“... number of Americans, known as Anti-Federalists, warned of impending tyranny. To mollify them, the Bill of Rights was added to the Constitution, protecting Americans’ essential liberties against abuses of national power. Initially, no clear connection existed between freedom, whiteness and fear of centralised authority. (A large majority of the presidents ...”

“... taught him how to speak with ‘TV cameras shoved in my face’. (He never saw combat.) The GI Bill paid for him to go to Ohio State, and he decided that he wanted to do well enough to get into law school – not because he had any real interest in the law, he says, but he wanted to make money, and he didn’t have a better idea of how to go about ...”

“... dozens of monographs, buildings named for him before he turned 60, attention from President Clinton, his face on stamps, at least 95 published interviews, translated into at least 28 languages, and now a 15-CD set, for sale through Radio Telefis Eireann, on which he reads his entire Collected Poems. (How long did it take to record?) Less renown than ...”

“... of one city.The principle of Public-Private Partnership was enshrined in the Government’s GLA Bill, and has remained central to Blair and Prescott’s plans for the Tube. Both Frank Dobson and Glenda Jackson endorsed it in their bids for the Labour candidacy. Despite the claims of some of its opponents, PPP for the Underground is not equivalent to the ...”

“... subdued profile of the new Germany has been the cost of reunification itself, for which the bill to date has come to more than a trillion dollars, saddling the country for years with stagnation, high unemployment and mounting public debt. France, though no greyhound itself, consistently outpaced Germany, posting faster rates of growth for a full decade ...”

“... of Stanley had made his own childhood ‘almost like the movie Rebecca’. Stanley went to DeWitt Clinton High School in the Bronx, which had already educated Will Eisner, one of the most revered figures in American comics, and Bob Kane and Bill Finger, the creators of Batman. He wouldn’t have been very interested in ...”

“... the growth of the country’s oil industry or its regional ambitions. In 1996, near the end of Bill Clinton’s first term, Congress passed a law threatening the imposition of heavy penalties on foreign companies that did business in Iran, such as European oil producers like France’s Total, soon to be a major investor in the development of the South ...”

“... the spirit of Thatcherism. Two days before she died, at the age of 89, she was denouncing the Clinton Administration’s plans, with Britain in tow, for the bombing of Iraq (‘they won’t even listen to the Iraqi opposition’). So, even though she used the expression herself until a few years ago, ‘war correspondent’ won’t quite do, in spite of ...”

“... had trebled since the end of the Cold War, the Americans were asked to pay 31 per cent of the bill. Unamir, the UN Assistance Mission in Rwanda, was therefore set up in such a way as to satisfy a highly costconscious Congress. From the moment the troops arrived in Rwanda, they lacked essentials. The Canadian force commander, Major-General Romeo ...”

“... as a way for the hierarchy to wriggle out of responsibility: In an ad in the Times on Tuesday, Bill Donohue, the Catholic League president, offered this illumination: ‘The Times continues to editorialise about the “paedophilia crisis”, when all along it’s been a homosexual crisis. Eighty per cent of the victims of priestly sexual abuse are male and ...”