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“... image of Vietnam that the veteran recalls; he says simply: ‘That was it – the war was lost. We just hung around trying to pretend it wasn’t.’ No complex truths, intentions or explanations survived the publication of the photograph. General Loan’s effort to send a stern signal turned people against the war he was trying so hard to justify. The ...”

“... much money chasing too few goods’, as the saying goes. The policy implication is that if we control the growth of the money stock, we can – ‘always and everywhere’ – control inflation.Friedman claimed that the historical evidence bore him out. In a monumental book from 1963, A Monetary History of the United ...”

“... of foreign fighters and weapons across the border. ‘If the American public saw the intelligence we were producing daily, at the most sensitive level, they would go ballistic,’ Flynn told me. ‘We understood Isis’s long-term strategy and its campaign plans, and we also discussed the ...”

“... Still as subversive as ever, I see. Me: I always had a visceral hatred of New Labour. Reid: If we’d listened to people like you the Tories would have been in power for another 13 years. Me: They were. Just called themselves New Labour. Tariq Ali Within a year or two we will remember the engagement interviews featuring ...”

“... and Wilson’s Huddersfield come to mind. Some deliberately distance themselves as Lloyd George did from Criccieth, while others consciously adopt a home in the manner of Harold Macmillan with Stockton-on-Tees. Yet others have behaved like President Bush, grabbing home-towns by the bushel in a slightly frenzied ...”

“... Destruction guarantees that neither party will breach protocol on these questions. Instead, the Bush campaign concentrates on the old ‘draft-dodging’ issue, and enlists the help of John Major’s mediocre Central Office in rummaging through old passport files. They fail to gauge the extent to which the New Democrat has left all that behind ...”

“... power against his neighbours.’ That same month, I heard that a CIA report stated: ‘We do not have any direct evidence that Iraq has used the period since Desert Fox to reconstitute its weapons of mass destruction programmes.’ In July 2001, I heard Condoleezza Rice say: ‘We are able to keep his arms from ...”

“... close-set, small, deliberately blinking eyes give off exactly the same impression. Ponting, like George Bush, is a bad boy made good, a brawler, drinker and gambler who turned a corner in his life when he realised that he was squandering his gifts, and that the path to the top lay open before him. There have been four Australian cricket captains during ...”

“... of disaster. The first of his two careers happened in the 1780s, before the commencement of what we now call the Romantic period. In 1781 Crabbe left a poor medical practice in his native Aldeburgh on a high-risk venture – the pursuit of a literary life in London. This coup de dés almost ended in ruin for Crabbe. He was plucked from calamity at the last ...”

“... dead or alive, is of little significance. In the West, Saudi Arabia is simply a source of oil. We prefer not to notice the scale of social and religious oppression, the widespread dejection and anxiety, the growing discontent among Saudis. The Wahabbi Islam practised there has been the inspiration of the Taliban. It was the Saudi monarchy that funded ...”

“... appears to have hinged largely on fuzzy perceptions of the ‘national mood’. Americans, we are told, are once again ‘feeling good about themselves’. There has been a revival of patriotism and pride. ‘The Zeitgeist,’ says Time, ‘has turned zesty.’ That there has indeed been a change in America’s mood over the last few years is hardly ...”

“... parts of the world. The problem is that Western Europeans think of these countries as backward. If we are shocked at what happened in the US it is because the US is in so many respects the most modern, the fastest changing society on earth. How can it also in some ways be so archaic? The question of course assumes that the European experience of modernisation ...”

“... It is only necessary to cite the cases of Gwilym and Megan Lloyd George to show that a politician’s biological heirs are not necessarily the infallible custodians of his or her political legacy. The fact that Alan Ryan’s view of Bertrand Russell and my own are very closely similar is not, therefore, proof that we are both right ...”

“... I travel in an elderly car, caked with dust, more likely to belong to an Iraqi than a Westerner. We peer nervously out of the rear window to see if we’re being followed. If anything looks suspicious the driver will turn off the main road into smaller streets, until he is sure nobody is behind us. Jadriyah, a middle-class ...”

“... a century ago the world had the chance to stop a ruthless aggressor and missed it. I pledge to you we will not make that mistake again.’ He would see the United States, uninhibited as she apparently was in 1956 by the separation of powers and the prerogatives of Congress, move with sureness and speed to confront a dictator in the Middle East. He would think ...”