“... they are entitled not to be summarily executed or tortured or held indefinitely without trial. The Bush administration after 9/11 set out to change all that. With the designation of unlawful combatant it created a self-sustaining doctrine that there are individuals who, having attacked the US or opposed it by force, have forfeited all rights both as combatants ...”

“... Shortly before the invasion of Iraq, George Bush’s economic adviser, Larry Lindsey, estimated that the war would cost $200 billion. ‘Baloney,’ Donald Rumsfeld fumed, offering a figure of $50-60 billion, some of which he said would be supplied by America’s friends. Andrew Natsios, the head of the Agency for International Development, told Ted Koppel on Nightline that postwar Iraq could be rebuilt for $1 ...”

“... I’m huffy about that; I wish I had his royalties. Royalties aside, what have they got that we haven’t? It’s not the texture of their prose I shouldn’t think, since most of us write better than most of them. (I don’t include Kierkegaard. He was a master and way out of the league that the rest of us play in.) Similarly, though many of the ...”

“... Knesset who had fought in the Warsaw Ghetto, made a direct appeal to Begin: ‘Return to reality. We are not in the Warsaw Ghetto, we are in the State of Israel.’ Amos Oz, who saw the invasion of Lebanon as ‘a typical Jabotinskyian fantasy’, wrote that ‘the urge to revive Hitler, only to kill him again and again, is ...”

“... the term coined by the political scientist Timothy Mitchell to explain his thesis that what we know as modern mass democracy was made possible by cheap, plentiful oil. But equally vital in the 1970s was ‘carbon solidarity’, the idea that weaker nations might use oil as leverage against the strong.A year earlier​ , in 1974, the UN General Assembly ...”

“... that Israel is still the only state in the world with no officially declared borders. And when we look at that 50-60 per cent in terms of the former Palestine, it amounts to about 12 per cent of the land from which the Palestinians were driven in 1948. The Israelis talk of ‘conceding’ these territories. But they were taken by conquest and, in a strict ...”

“... authoritarian regimes who keep both radical Islamists and liberal democrats at bay. When George Bush and Tony Blair invaded Iraq they promoted the idea that the West was facing a worldwide jihadi threat led by al-Qaida. The global war on terror was against a single enemy: radical Islam. At first, each manifestation of that threat was attacked ...”

“... of the Kurds. The US faces the same dilemma in Iraq and Syria today as it did after 9/11 when George Bush declared the war on terror. It was known then that 15 of the 19 hijackers were Saudis, Osama bin Laden was a Saudi and the money for the operation came from Saudi donors. But the US didn’t want to pursue al-Qaida at the expense of its relations ...”

“... this is simple paucity of evidence, aggravated by the untrustworthiness of much of the testimony we do have. As Hampson says on page one of his book, ‘two hundred years later the historian finds himself in front of a locked door to which there is no key.’ There are at least three ways in which it might be possible to write more compellingly about ...”

“... have hamstrung recovery. An official of the Foreign Ministry told me in Hanoi last year: ‘We have changed our attitude. The Americans dropped so many bombs – as we say, enough for everyone to have a crater on each shoulder. But now we want normalisation without conditions, which ...”

“... on its own risks inviting it to abandon the Kurds again – as they did in 1975 and 1991, when George Bush senior, having called on the Kurds and the Shias to rise up and overthrow their dictator, suddenly permitted Saddam to crush their rebellion with his air force. The Kurds have a Kurdish interest, more than an Iraqi one, in Mosul. Protecting Mosul ...”

“... perspectives. It seems heroically optimistic to expect new institutions to avoid these problems. We may regret the failure of political globalisation to keep pace with economic globalisation, but political globalisation can’t be achieved by decree, and it would be more sensible to seek reforms that could increase well-being without requiring nations to ...”

“... weapons. Had UTN made a similar offer to al-Qaida? Or was there some other reason for the meeting? We’re told in Ron Suskind’s The One Per Cent Doctrine (2006) that Cheney cut through all the talk about indications and probabilities: ‘If there’s a one per cent chance that Pakistani scientists are helping al-Qaida build or develop a nuclear ...”

“... Guard along the length of the frontier. The bill is sponsored by John McCain (Arizona), who, like George W. Bush, was once an immigration liberal but sees where the votes have come to lie in recent years. Two highly visible protagonists in the immigration drama, Salvador Reza and the Republican state senator, Russell ...”

“... George Saunders – whose semi-official website carries a reminder that the man who played Addison DeWitt in All about Eve was called George SANDERS – was born in Chicago in 1958. A schoolteacher got him interested in literature, but having been exposed at an impressionable age to the novels of Ayn Rand he ended up studying geophysical engineering: ‘I didn’t want to be one of those life-sucking parasitic artists,’ he recalled last year ...”