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“... 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 ...”

“... many members of the ‘counter-culture’ subscribing, for example, to the gay shibboleth that we’re all perpetually dressed in drag. (That is, we use clothes and manner to fabricate a conventional gender identity that’s inconsistent with the shifting, unconventional nature of our individual desires.) What did matter ...”

“... of the Herero people in the early years of the last century. Part of the horror of Rwanda is that we think of genocide as belonging to an age we had left behind. Gaillard, a medieval scholar, said that the apocalypse in Rwanda was prefigured in the works of Breughel and in the cast of characters consigned to the Inferno in ...”

“... prejudiced in favour of individual over collective judgments. This is hardly surprising, since we are all biased. First, we are biased in favour of our own opinions, which we tend to prefer to those of anyone else. Second, we are biased in favour of ...”

“... of Graham Greene and Gabriel García Márquez) and then under Manuel Noriega (former friend of George Bush), is now firmly back in its control. (As John Major says in the Cambridge History, the Panama Canal has been the ‘outstanding symbol of Washington’s power to dominate the weaker states of the hemisphere’.) It still exercises direct colonial ...”

“... Coupole’. ‘Henry’s gravelly voice let everyone immediately know that he was an American,’ George Whitman, the owner of the Shakespeare Bookshop in Paris, recently recalled. He never turned into one of those phoney American artists around town. Henry was a native American first, although he considered American air-conditioning a nightmare. He never ...”