“... Let my first Years be past, That I may give for every Day Some good Account at last. Benjamin Franklin was soon working up his secularised version of the Puritan ethos. In Poor Richard’s Almanac (1758) he assured his readers that ‘sloth, by bringing on diseases, absolutely shortens life,’ regretted the human propensity to sleep too much, and ...”

“... they call ‘A People’s Inaugural’. Before a huge, informal and mainly young crowd, Aretha Franklin sings ‘Respect’ and Bob Dylan makes a surprise appearance to perform ‘Chimes of Freedom’. Clinton and his young family appear to sing along with both. There is much heady talk about the end of the Eighties, that decade of greed and self-delusion ...”

“... you will not be astonished to learn, was ‘grey’ in the opinion of the Bundys.)Now, I know that Michael Ignatieff was aware of the existence of the above correspondence at least a year ago. And I also urged Bird to send it to him. But the Vietnam drama takes up less than a page of his biography, and mentions Berlin’s real positions not at all. We are ...”

“... on distressing display during Obama’s second term. The deaths of Eric Garner in Staten Island, Michael Brown in Ferguson, Freddie Gray in Baltimore, Tamir Rice in Cleveland, Walter Scott in North Charleston and Philando Castile in Minneapolis were grisly evidence that the use of lethal force by the police against black people was a national problem. As ...”

“... a new controversy erupted in 2004 when it was revealed that a key Pentagon official called Larry Franklin had passed classified information to an Israeli diplomat. Israel is hardly the only country that spies on the US, but its willingness to spy on its principal patron casts further doubt on its strategic value. Israel’s strategic value isn’t the only ...”

“... just anti-intellectual, but a sort of anti-book. It’s a curiosity, a work of paraliterature, the Franklin Mint collectible of English writing. Look at it as it sits there, massive, hollow and a little sinister, like one of those hand-tooled leatherette book-a-likes you can hide your videos in.But it was also the life’s work, laboured over for decades, of a ...”