“... to such behaviour because they fall outside the civilising processes of the West. Thus beneath Donald Rumsfeld’s magnificently evasive ‘Stuff happens’ – the formula allows us to think for a second that such things might happen to anyone, including presumably us, or even him – we glimpse a much harsher, discriminatory form of judgment. Between ...”

“... one school in Florida restricted access to ‘The Hill We Climb’, the poem Amanda Gorman read at Joe Biden’s inauguration, after a parent complained that it contained ‘hate messages’.DeSantis is an extreme example of the right’s doublethink around free speech. In that sense he is a boon for more moderate Republicans. His legislative ...”

“... Stuart Arminianism and ceremonialism coloured by the 19th-century Anglican legacy. We may have read too much Trollope, from whose pages it would not be hard to construct the familiar caricature of a worldly, corpulent Jacobean clergy, basking under the lax supervision of courtly bishops. Then there is the hindsight problem. Some distinguished accounts of ...”

“... out for a couple hours … sort of like going to Central Park’.I thought of Joe when I read about Christian Cooper, the black birdwatcher who crossed paths with a white woman and her dog in Central Park on the morning of 25 May, the same day George Floyd was killed when a police officer in Minneapolis knelt on his neck for nine minutes. There are ...”

“... size in the normal run of things? These are the formulae, almost exactly, that were reached for by Donald Trump and Jair Bolsonaro in their earliest denial mode (from which Bolsonaro remains unbudged). To Camus, such thinking shouldn’t be dismissed as the ranting of dangerous fools, even when it is that. He is interested in how human subjects deal with ...”

“... and the oligarchs who gained ownership of privatised assets.When the media want to discuss whether Donald Trump is a fascist, whether Brexit is an imperialist project or the way pandemics end, historians will be among the experts consulted. The public intellectual in the English-speaking world who has offered the most expansive sociological analyses of the ...”

“... and have an air of monumental importance, but they are divided into short, breezy chapters that read like extended blog posts. Still, they’re not without interest. Zemmour is a declinist, in the French tradition that goes back to the 18th century, but his account is an idiosyncratic one. It does not begin with the storming of the Bastille, but with the ...”

“... in Iraq. Nor were the mental blinkers restricted to the field operatives. On 10 September 2001, Donald Rumsfeld announced to a Pentagon audience: ‘Today we declare war on bureaucracy.’ This ‘war on bureaucracy’, inspired in part by Friedman, meant that virtually no effort was made to rebuild the shattered administrative and regulatory machinery in ...”

“... a first-rate American poetess. She really is good. Certainly one of the best female poets I ever read, and a damn sight better than the run of good male. Her main enthusiasm at present is me, and she thinks my verses are as good as I think they are and has accordingly and efficiently dispatched about twenty five to various immensely paying American ...”

“... economy grow? Probably more slowly but maybe more reliably. What if everyone were required to read ‘Money Creation in the Modern Economy’? Would capitalism survive? Of course it would. Once collective faith is invested in something, it becomes very hard to shake. ‘The process by which banks create money is so simple that the mind is ...”

“... is said to like his courtiers to call him Iskander, Arabic for Alexander the Great, and to read tales of his exploits in bed. To deal with remaining naysayers, he decreed that criticism of the king or the crown prince be treated as an act of terror. A new state security service, modelled on Egypt’s Amn El Dawla, an internal intelligence ...”

“... greater fervour. Because he took the phrase as his own, these developments are associated with Donald Trump. But others saw this coming a decade before he became president. During the George W. Bush administration, the senior US journalist Ron Suskind encountered a White House official who admonished him for living in what he called the ‘reality-based ...”

“... was launched in 2017 ‘to challenge herd mentality wherever we see it’. At first the website read like a more sedate version of the Telegraph’s opinion pages and struggled to make an impact. But since 2019, when ConservativeHome founder Tim Montgomerie was replaced as editor and Freddie Sayers joined as executive editor (he is now editor-in-chief and ...”

“... spareness, or what seemed spareness to me then. In fact Life Studies was the first book of his I read; I hadn’t read the earlier rhetorical stuff. I went on to that and didn’t like it. So I ended up loving passionately about six poems in Life Studies. I didn’t particularly like the family poems. They were okay but ...”

“... writings entitled The Wit and Wisdom of Boris Johnson, but – full disclosure – I omitted to read the work under review.)Looking at those writings now, I would say it was beyond dispute that Johnson has turned out to be the most influential satirist of his generation. People who complain that there’s no right-wing satire in this country should forget ...”