“... a few months ago I put on a suit and went to Westminster to meet a senior Conservative MP. ‘We’re all on a journey,’ he told me when I asked whether his beliefs had changed, ‘all of us.’ Then, as an example of the ‘quality and range’ of the party’s new parliamentary candidates, he began to tell me about Wilfred Emmanuel-Jones. I hadn’t ...”

“... In the early months of George Bush’s Presidency, before his reassuringly innocuous pronouncements and prudent compromises at the Nato summit had allowed the American media to discover prophetic qualities in him, editorial pages were much occupied by pundits clashing over what Bush, during the electoral campaign, had plaintively labelled ‘the vision thing ...”

“... Four years ago, on 28 January 2003, in his State of the Union address to Congress, George Bush referred to the prisoners – more than ten and a half thousand of them – the United States had taken into custody in the course of the war in Afghanistan and the so-called war on terror. Not all were in prison, he said: some had been ‘otherwise dealt with ...”

“... ever-distant telos his arrival at which will represent the revelated transformation of a present we stomach by looking beyond.’ Over the same period, however, things were starting to go wrong for Wallace. In the Lipsky interview he concedes that he was drinking and that he smoked a lot of marijuana, but It was more just like, I got more and more unhappy ...”

“... the reader towards an odd style of religiosity. Nor is this just a side effect: it is this that we are really being invited to ‘join’ – empowerment through faith, via spiritual transport. You’ll have to tell them frankly you can’t explain Why Nineveh is still standing though you hope to learn At the feet of a prophet who for all you know May be ...”

“... a digital public square that’s inclusive and trusted,’ he said. Then he asked: ‘How else are we going to get Trump elected in 2024?’ In his biography, which was published in 2023 (and now out in paperback), Isaacson writes that he assumed Musk was making a joke.In 2022, Twitter was fifteen years old, glitzy and intermittently profitable, but Wall ...”

“... meanwhile, pressures were mounting to deal with long-deferred domestic priorities. Neither George Bush nor Bill Clinton nor Boris Yeltsin could claim the authority in foreign affairs that Reagan and Gorbachev had commanded during the mid-Eighties – or, for that matter, their ability to think ahead, however superficially, about where they would ...”

“... law. The Kurds’ deal looked far worse, until television pictures of their plight embarrassed the Bush Administration. Bush had already been seen to betray them: on 15 February 1991 he called for an uprising; on 23 March he decided to allow Iraq to deploy the helicopter gunships that suppressed them and restored Baathist ...”

“... A key justification of the Bush administration’s purported strategy of ‘democratising’ the Middle East is the argument that democracies are pacific, and that Muslim democracies will therefore eventually settle down peacefully under the benign hegemony of the US. Yet, as Andrew Bacevich points out in one of the most acute analyses of America to have appeared in recent years, the United States itself is in many ways a militaristic country, and becoming more so: at the end of the Cold War, Americans said yes to military power ...”

“... of this extraordinary affair were rather different. There was, first and foremost, President Bush’s unpleasant determination to play fast and loose with the calibre and standing of the Supreme Court. I say this not because he allowed partisan considerations to sway him in his selection of Judge Thomas: that was only to be expected. Virtually every ...”

“... the question of the moment: has the American republic turned into an empire? And if so, should we cheer, lament or simply get on with imperial business? Both describe an empire of material desire, of consumption, of get rich now. You might call it an empire of greed. Steve Fraser is a fine New Deal historian whose biography of the union leader Sidney ...”

“... the Israeli position. One American participant at Camp David in 2000 later said: ‘Far too often, we functioned … as Israel’s lawyer.’ Finally, the Bush administration’s ambition to transform the Middle East is at least partly aimed at improving Israel’s strategic situation. This extraordinary generosity might be ...”

“... I bumped into my brother in the street and we talked about Fintan O’Toole’s book on the beef tribunal. I told him to read it immediately. I myself had stopped both reading about the beef tribunal and eating beef in 1991, after a two-line thing in the Irish Times about cirrhotic calves’ livers being packed by someone, somewhere in Ireland ...”

“... a former member of Kadyrov’s security service confided to me, ‘I kept asking: “How are we going to find the rebels or their caches of ammunition?” And they told me it was a “chain”: we go after someone, and “work” with him until he gives us names, and then we follow ...”

“... world from Russell Hoban’s Riddley Walker, the political ideas from Naomi Klein and George Monbiot. As a result it’s far too cartoonish and second-hand to have any real bite: it’s like looking into a snowglobe for a deep moral message. Like Cloud Atlas, Mitchell’s sixth novel is a globe-trotting, time-travelling extravaganza, divided into ...”