“... pressure from the UN, since the ‘unique relationship’ policy outlined in a White House memo of May 1961 still applies: ‘Israel must know that if attacked, it can count on United States action inside and outside the United Nations.’ Biden is known to dislike Netanyahu, but at the height of the killings they were talking every other day. The Israeli ...”

“... disparaged the culture of gift-giving on which that influence seemed to rely. The diplomat David Urquhart’s neurosis about Russian influence at Constantinople derived from his failure to persuade Ottoman officials to accept his proposals for a free-trade treaty; his Eurocentric perspective led him to smell a Russian plot. Britain used its naval power ...”

“... Lega was already in another far-right grouping). The ECR had been the creature of the Tories since David Cameron turned his back on the mainstream conservative European Peoples Party (EPP), historically the driving force of European integration. But Brexit meant that the Conservatives didn’t contest the 2019 European election. This was another stroke of luck ...”

“... New Nations, organised by the Parsons-derived sociologist Edward Shils and the political scientist David Apter. Geertz quotes from Shils’s amusingly unself-conscious, Cold War-imperial foundational essay: The categories we employ are the same as the ones we employ in our studies of our own societies, and they postulate the fundamental affinities of all ...”

“... wave of militancy among agricultural workers erupted into a harvest-time strike at Rudston Farm. David Holtby could afford the wage increases: it was the Saturday half-day that he couldn’t stomach. Baffled and defeated, he threw in his hand and sold the farm. Winifred came back from the war to find her parents living in wealthy suburban Cottingham, on the ...”

“... adopted it in a decorous shape for his longest and most ambitious work, The Moralists. David Hume, whom Diderot befriended in Paris in the 1760s, used it to scandalously sceptical effect in his Dialogues concerning Natural Religion, unpublishable until after his death. Diderot’s most famous work is a dialogue: Rameau’s Nephew, in which a ...”

“... We were to discuss: (1) the value of the peace treaty between Egypt and Israel (this was Camp David time), (2) peace between Israel and the Arab world generally, and (3) the rather more fundamental question of future coexistence between Israel and the surrounding Arab world. None of the Arabs seemed happy with this. I felt it leapfrogged over the matter ...”

“... Hemingway marathon, to the fling with James Gavin (hero of the 82nd Airborne), to the affair with David Gurewitsch in Cuernavaca, even the marriage to Tom Matthews in 1954 that made her so ‘plain silly happy’ at first: You see, I have chalked it up too well, and see where and how I am caught – and how tightly. Through ignorance, carelessness, pride and ...”

“... to Klain, ‘that there was no way to build a nationwide pluralistic democracy based in Kabul’. David Petraeus and other generals instead convinced Obama to send in tens of thousands of additional troops. On the campaign trail in 2020, Biden promised to pull out US troops and told an interviewer that he would feel ‘zero responsibility’ for what happened ...”

“... bring peace to the realm. Those who supported Hugh no doubt hoped for political advantage; they may also have decided that he would be the more effective ruler. The legitimacy of his rule was challenged, not least in its first years, when a rebellion by the rejected Charles of Lorraine nearly succeeded in toppling him. But this needs to be set against the ...”

“... but never to the same point in time or space. As Le Guin said in an interview: ‘Homecoming may not be such an easy visit, after all. The world is changing. It is a spiral. That is kind of the point.’The primary moral law of Le Guin’s fiction, that fully realised power creates its own destructive counter-currents, operates to her disadvantage in ...”

“... grungers Green River adopted the nickname of a femicidal mass murderer.In 1988, Melody Maker’s David Stubbs declared that it had been ‘the best ever year for rock music’, listing 49 bands in evidence. Hardly any of them had cracked the top ten of the album chart. Three years later, the unthinkable happened: grunge went mainstream, with Nirvana’s ...”

“... to the contrary. ‘The category “the West” does not seem to be in Donald Trump’s head,’ David Brooks wrote at the start of Trump’s second term. In The Technological Republic: Hard Power, Soft Belief and the Future of the West, Alexander Karp, the head of Palantir, writes that ‘the West’ is ‘a concept that has been discarded by many, almost ...”

“... it was exactly this quality of noble withholding that she sought to achieve. Cather’s preference may have been shaped by emotional identification. Unlike Bernhardt, whose love affairs were notorious, the real-life Duse seemed to have no husband and no friends: ‘She is utterly alone upon the icy heights where other beings cannot live.’ ‘Cather was only ...”