“... to put his own spin on the tragedy – and, indeed, on the romance. Within days of the car crash, Michael Cole – al-Fayed’s ultra-Brit PR man – was feeding the newspapers sugary tidbits from the couple’s final hours. Diana, he said, had given Dodi a pair of cufflinks that had once belonged to her father. Dodi had responded with a ‘Tell me ...”

“... not to repeat their lèse-majesté. David Landes takes the story from the scholar of Islam, Michael Cook. It is, for him, a moral tale. Autocracies squeeze, steal and demean. ‘Only societies with room for multiple initiatives,’ he insists, ‘from below more than from above, can think in terms of a growing pie.’ That is why they become rich. And ...”

“... the Foreign Office agitated for foreign-language broadcasts to counter the propaganda of the Axis powers. John Reith, the director general, felt obliged to accept an arrangement that, as Potter puts it, ‘included agreeing that news editors would accept specific guidance from civil servants as to which items needed to be included in, or omitted ...”

“... politics. He doesn’t mention either that it was Obama who, as Moyn has put it, ‘enhanced the powers of a presidency, which is now in the hands of a charlatan’, or that in his effort to appease the Republican far right, Obama deported immigrants at a higher rate than Trump has so far. Macron, another of Mounk’s cherished liberal democrats, has, while ...”

“... charges, most of which were later thrown out of court. Justifying these arrests, the mayor, Michael Bloomberg, said: ‘Some people think that we shouldn’t allow people to express themselves. That’s exactly what the terrorists did, if you think about it, on 9/11. Now this is not the same kind of terrorism, but there’s no question that these ...”

“... killed men in war, married, had children, and at the moment when he was at the height of his powers and had everything a man could seem to want, he lost interest in life and had to take measures to avoid the temptation of suicide. He began an intellectual quest for meaning, but found meaning instead in the Christian faith of the narod, the common ...”

“... Bagradian is concerned when he isn’t mobilised, given that the empire had joined the Central Powers in war in November 1914. He goes to the district capital to find out why, overhears officials, including the provincial governor, discussing Armenians in sinister fashion, and is finally warned of the imminent danger by an old Muslim family friend. It’s ...”

“... some argued that Africans were naturally inferior to whites, planters feared they would lose their powers to enslave when their workers became Christians. If African slavery came to dominate the labour systems of the Americas for pragmatic rather than ideological reasons, we might wonder when ideology – and theories of race – entered the picture. Davis ...”

“... the scale, theorists of humanitarian intervention from Harvard or Princeton like John Ruggie and Michael Doyle, speaks for itself. But since the real work of the UN is the manufacture not of actions but of legitimations, the two key figures were the set’s ventriloquists, who wrote the speeches and articles furbishing the secretary-general with his ...”

“... it into social democrats whom Washington can work with, and demagogues who must be contained. As Michael Reid, an editor at the Economist, puts it, it is ‘hard to overstate what is at stake in this ideological rivalry, this battle for Latin America’s soul’ between liberal democrats and a new generation of knights errant who have learned to manipulate ...”

“... the psychologically ruined war veteran Septimus Smith. In that novel the two didn’t meet, though Michael Cunningham, refracting the material in The Hours, had his modern-day Clarissa figure care for Richard, his version of Septimus, worn down by the struggle with HIV. The ending, suicide by jumping, was the same in both books.Murphy has set out, in ...”

“... Valley leaders, and his book is in part an argument that states should intervene to constrain the powers of AI companies. He sets out a plausible case that we will see highly accelerated technological progress, driven by but not limited to AI, that there are very significant risks associated with this and that 21st-century politics isn’t well placed to deal ...”

“... I want to take up some comments on Berlin’s essay by an acute critic of the liberal tradition, Michael Sandel. Berlin ‘comes perilously close to foundering on the relativist predicament’: If one’s convictions are only relatively valid, why stand for them unflinchingly? In a tragically configured moral universe, such as Berlin assumes, is the ideal ...”

“... between the upper and the lower cases. Almost everyone is some sort of nationalist, including even Michael Forsyth, the new Tory Secretary of State for Scotland. In retreat, the Conservatives have discovered that true Unionism awarded Scotland just as much nationalism as was good for it, via Scots Law, institutional autonomy and new devices like the National ...”

“... experience included riot control in Belfast – was educated in Co. Cork and his superior, Michael O’Dwyer, was a Catholic from Tipperary.With empire comes slavery. Bishop Berkeley owned slaves on Rhode Island. Burke was a tepid abolitionist because of the interests of friends and family. Irish involvement was extensive, eventually as masters. When ...”