“... 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 ...”

“... in the Federal elections of 6 March 1983. In an essay in this book, Mark Hertsgaard writes: ‘George Bush boasted that he ended the Cold War and vanquished the nuclear threat. If any individual can make so grand a claim, Petra Kelly has a greater right to.’ As regards Ms Kelly, this is complete nonsense. If the Greens and SPD had gained enough ...”

“... turns right, fighting the Vietnam War all over again single-handed. ‘Sir,’ he asks, ‘do we get to win this time?’ ‘Bring​ the war home’: what began as an anti-war slogan on the American left was appropriated by the extreme right as a proclamation of intent. Louis Beam – one of the major strategists of the paramilitary right and a central ...”

“... the style of the Biden administration was a blend of high-end Ralph Lauren and Andy Warhol.We can use the past tense because, whatever happens in the election, Bidenism is over. The project anchored on the long-serving senator from Delaware and Obama’s vice president had one term in it. Up until the last moments, his entourage closed ranks to deny ...”

“... the road. Over the course of the next hour or so they met other patrol groups from the company. ‘We then did a U-turn on Green 9 and Green 12’ – these were combat zones – ‘and turned into an area known to us as “India”,’ says Lance Sergeant Stephen Phipps. ‘We then made our way through the al-Mukatil ...”

“... one-liner, more redolent of Chicago under Prohibition than Downing Street, was uttered by Lloyd George. The Premier was reflecting upon one of his constant obsessions: the British press. His method of dealing with it, not wholly abandoned to this day, possessed a buccaneering simplicity. He ennobled the newspaper tycoons, distributing titles with a zest ...”

“... to ‘look at the run-up to the conflict, the conflict itself and the reconstruction, so that we can learn lessons’.* It offers a long and painful account of an episode that may come to be seen as marking the moment when the UK fell off its global perch, trust in government collapsed and the country turned inward and began to disintegrate. When the ...”

“... be going too far for Hobbes, who insisted that the state was merely ‘that Mortall God, to which we owe under the Immortal God, our peace and defence’. But whatever else is true about a world in which such headlines are possible, it is certainly far removed from Hobbes’s original state of nature. The forgetfulness or otherwise of the French about what ...”

“... lap around his precocious career as a hotshot critic, magazine editor and merchant of ideas (what we would call today, if we hadn’t any shame, a thought leader). Putting extra pep into Podhoretz’s trot is the beaming knowledge that his success transcends that of mere mortal scribblers and red pencillers. To borrow from ...”