“... 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 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 ...”

“... the ‘Joke county, smallest in England’, is real because it once held     my old Friend, Bill Partridge. Dead now. Had you noticed? How heavy that weighs, how wide the narrowest shire! Because all space forms itself round the loved, who become more and more, as time passes, the loved dead, all counties really are alike ‘the smallest’; just as ...”

“... he performed badly at school and was expelled from Stuyvesant High for stealing pens. At DeWitt Clinton High School, where he was a contemporary of Nathanael West and Lionel Trilling without knowing either of them, he began to develop a talent for mathematics. He also befriended Lester Winter, a ‘polished, worldly, well-groomed’ young man who introduced ...”

“... injecting liquidity to calm the markets and arguably fending off recession. Second, along with the Clinton-era Treasury secretaries Robert Rubin and Larry Summers, he successfully lobbied for deregulation of the credit industry, including the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act, which had separated investment banks from commercial banks. At the same time he ...”

“... was picked up by two men in a West Hollywood bar, taken to Plummer Park, given a marked ten-dollar bill and placed under arrest. The fate of John Garfield was more terrible. Garfield had been the hope of the Hollywood left for more than a decade, and his sentimental aura remains sufficiently intense, even now, to warrant a heroic catalogue of his films in the ...”