“... a first draft of The Idiot in the early 2000s, publishing it only in 2017 – by which point Donald Trump, a familiar figure from my youth, was somehow in charge of the United States, and Roe was under serious threat, and I, on the eve of my fortieth birthday, was going around the country promoting a ‘debut novel’ about a painful crush I had had when ...”

“... week since the vote. The Tories appear to have found their Hillary Clinton, and disposed of their Donald Trump. The real Hillary Clinton will be breathing a sigh of relief. The Labour Party, precisely because it realised that Corbyn might be contemplating the kind of pivot described above, has risen in arms to preserve its essential City connection. What will ...”

“... nearly wrecking talks on strategic arms limitation (Ford’s young, hawkish secretary of defence, Donald Rumsfeld, had successfully called for a freeze on Salt II). Castro was taking big risks, but as Gleijeses argues, his adventures in Latin America had reached an impasse, while Africa still offered opportunities. Cuba had its anti-imperialist credentials to ...”

“... Facebook is generally agreed to have played a big, perhaps even a crucial, role in the election of Donald Trump. The benefit to humanity is not clear. This thought, or something like it, seems to have occurred to Zuckerberg, because the new mission statement spells out a reason for all this connectedness. It says that the new mission is to ‘give people the ...”

“... Dream, Caroline Finkel’s massive 550-page history of the Ottoman Empire published in 2006, we read that ‘terrible massacres took place on both sides.’ As for genocide, the very word is a misfortune, which not only ‘bedevils any wider understanding of the history of the fate of Ottoman Armenians’ – not to speak of ‘Turkish foreign relations ...”

“... king, is the new broom he was thought to be when he succeeded his father in 1999. Finally, as we read about the long struggles between prisoners and invigilators, we encounter a brutal parody of high politics in the outside world: shame, betrayal, self-deception and the art of deceiving others, though the guards in Tazmamart were the inmates’ only ...”

“... WINEP, and who included Elliot Abrams, John Bolton, Douglas Feith, William Kristol, Bernard Lewis, Donald Rumsfeld, Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz, had little trouble persuading the Clinton administration to adopt the general goal of ousting Saddam. But they were unable to sell a war to achieve that objective. They were no more able to generate enthusiasm ...”

“... conventional lines, but a federal supreme court on the American model. Corresponding in 1957 with Donald Swatland, a Wall Street lawyer who had been a wartime associate of Monnet, Gaudet explained that ‘federal ideas are still very new in continental Europe’, and sought guidance in promoting them. He also developed a close relationship with the American ...”