“... of Iraq as an opportunity to streamline America’s military structure and doctrine. Indeed, Donald Rumsfeld seems to have been so single-mindedly focused on his reform agenda, meant to improve the war-fighting capacity of US troops, that he apparently shrugged off the question of what to do after victory. Scandalously, US soldiers were given no ...”

“... the entry code. It’s as if you’ve been shoved onstage, without lines, in a play you’ve never read. Smile brightly. Bluff like a politician in a glass booth being manipulated by semaphoring black-suited attendants with clipboards. So? ‘All for the best in the best of all possible Londons,’ says the mayor, says the minister, says Joanna Lumley. ‘All ...”

“... two years of college paralleled the interests of various women I was trying to get to know.’ He read Marx and Marcuse to impress a ‘long-legged socialist’, Fanon and Gwendolyn Brooks for a ‘smooth-skinned sociology major’, Foucault and Virginia Woolf to keep up with an ‘ethereal bisexual who wore mostly black’. It didn’t work. ‘As a strategy ...”

“... leadership in Hungary, the judiciary and media have been neutered, while in his second term Donald Trump is trying to undermine the functions of the US state by wilfully flouting the law. Far-right populist movements are usually built around conspiracist demagogues who promise to remove rights from minority groups and whose supporters trade in ...”

“... Said speaks of. I watch my children grow up as Americans in the same way that I might read about, or create, fictional characters. They are not fictional, of course, but their Americanism can sometimes seem unreal to me. ‘I have an American seventh-grader,’ I say to myself with amazement, as I watch my 12-year-old daughter perform at one of ...”

“... June, the sixth day of Israel’s attack on Iran, David Petraeus gave some unsolicited advice to Donald Trump in an interview with the New York Times. Trump, he said, should deliver an ultimatum to Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, ordering him to dismantle Iran’s uranium enrichment programme or face ‘the complete destruction of your country and your regime and ...”

“... of Mao, Deng and Jiang. The American sinologist Orville Schell, who accompanied both Joe Biden and Donald Trump to meetings with Xi, said he had ‘encountered few leaders whose body language and facial expressions reveal so little’.If Xi lacks the vivid individuality of Deng or Jiang, it is not for reasons of self-concealment. Within China his personal ...”

“... yet you do not want to be destroyed, but perhaps hope may be preserved for complete strangers to read, is ineradicable. We want to confess ourselves in writing to a few friends, and we do not always want to feel that no one but those friends will ever read what we have written.Eliot’s considerable correspondence with ...”

“... love for the common man, but written in such a forbidding way that the common man is unlikely to read it. Well, The Lord of the Rings is the opposite. It is a work written to keep the modern world at bay that the modern world adores. In the late 1990s, Best Book polls conducted for Waterstone’s and Channel Four, the Daily Telegraph, the Folio Society and ...”

“... her even more than usual. Her father was dying at the time. It wasn’t exactly that men could read her thoughts, but certainly she felt that they were picking up on her vulnerability, seizing their moment to probe an open wound. They were excited by her distress (one target of Weinstein’s advances said he was clearly roused by her fear). The aim of ...”

“... the tongue of Foucault’. Even the austere European Journal of International Law thought it ‘read like a thriller’.Signal amid this enthusiasm has been a lack of curiosity about the author himself. To understand The Passage to Europe, however, a sense of where van Middelaar comes from is required. Born in 1973 in Eindhoven, the company town of Phillips ...”

“... to be done just on a whim’. A whim? She has obviously not spoken to any transsexual people or read a word they have written. In her current TV series I Am Cait, Jenner is keen to extend a hand to transsexual women and men who don’t enjoy her material privileges. She has made a point of giving space to minority transsexuals such as Zeam Porter who face ...”

“... in its progress to cover this country with permanent disgrace, I do not know and have not read of.’ A comic classic, Foreign Mud by Maurice Collis, tells the story, but in China the Opium War is not funny. The veteran director Xie Jin’s new $12 million blockbuster (the budget was raised in Shanghai) modelled, he says, on Schindler’s ...”

“... is spared – in Freud’s words, ‘the perplexity and helplessness of the human race’.To read Freud against this backdrop is to witness someone capable of the wildest fluctuations, covering the entire range of switching moods to which everyone I know, affected by today’s pandemic, has at one point or another succumbed. ‘We are suffering under no ...”

“... notice of her, the waitress even calling her ‘duck’ and offering her a copy of the Mirror to read while she waited for her bacon, egg, baked beans and fried bread. It wasn’t a paper she would normally read, but bacon, egg, baked beans and fried bread wasn’t a breakfast she would normally eat either, and she got so ...”