“... by a vision, possessed by it.’ Nixon subsequently came to much the same conclusion, as did Henry Kissinger: Mao led a life as ‘withdrawn and mysterious even as the emperors he disdained’, and ‘emanated vibrations of strength and power and will’. You can’t get much more exotic than that. Spence comments that Lord Macartney, face to face ...”

“... Lord Macaulay so crisply profiled Frederick ‘the Great’. Walter Isaacson’s new study of Kissinger shows beyond doubt that he rose to power by intriguing for and against an ally, the South Vietnamese military junta, whom he had sworn to defend, and that in the process of covering his tracks, consolidating and extending his power and justifying his ...”

“... crazy powerful Trump. The powerless fall out of the picture, as Clinton woos Condoleezza Rice and Henry Kissinger. Every popular front leaves someone out. The Democratic Convention featured speakers ranging from the mothers of victims of police murder to Michael Bloomberg, an unapologetic defender as mayor of New York of stop-and-search policing. It did ...”

“... and a waiting list 33 years long’ – members include, to mention only the more exhausted, Henry Kissinger and Ronald Reagan – has an annual retreat with its own musical comedy show, artfully entitled The Low Jinks. It has an all-male cast and an all-male audience; the biggest crowd-pleaser, one witness reported, was Bubbles Boobenheim, a drag ...”

“... never parochial in his outlook. At the Harvard International Summer Seminar of 1965, directed by Henry Kissinger, he told Ralph Ellison: ‘I believe that the problem of American blacks comes from the two refuges they have constructed for themselves: Christianity and jazz.’ But he became more and more apolitical and pessimistic. Despite his return to ...”

“... that the Senate compromise didn’t attract any criticism from Perry, his abolitionist allies (Henry Kissinger, George Shultz, Sam Nunn), or, indeed, from any prominent figure in the nonproliferation complex. One might have assumed that one of them would have publicly condemned the move, yet there was barely a peep. This could be because the complex ...”

“... when he – Schmidt – was a teenager that had turned him against the regime. With the help of Henry Kissinger and the Guggenheim Museum in New York, Schmidt worked assiduously to promote Nolde’s work in the United States. He liked to boast that thanks to their combined efforts the Germans had dethroned the French Fauvists in the international ...”

“... Stalin is not ‘the supreme realist – patient, shrewd and implacable’ – described by Henry Kissinger, or even the ‘rational and level-headed’ statesman following traditional Russian imperatives portrayed by the Israeli historian Gabriel Gorodetsky. Kotkin’s Stalin is shrewd and crafty, but sometimes too crafty for his own good. He ...”

“... revealed Gelli’s friendship with all sorts of powerful international figures: the inevitable Henry Kissinger, Mr Moon, Vice-President Bush and the President of the World Bank, Robert McNamara. More serious was the realisation that the antique-dealer, Deverini, who was accused of having helped Gelli to enter Monaco illegally, had earlier been accused ...”

“... Fish’s appeals to history are almost always gestural. He means by history something like what Henry Kissinger means by it – that is, as far back as he can remember. This is a pity, since if he had a rather richer sense of the past he might recognise that the universalist liberal principles he abhors were once the last word in iconoclasm. In the age ...”

“... president, Anwar Sadat. But she did keep a close eye on Arab military activities, and asked Henry Kissinger to reassure Syria and Egypt that she had no intention of starting a conflict. She also called for a partial troop mobilisation shortly before the attack, without which the country’s losses would probably have been even ...”

“... various reasons for the decision including the fact that ‘political satire became obsolete when Henry Kissinger was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.’ Lehrer’s work is sometimes Swiftian in its darkness and Parr emphasises that it was this that inspired him. Humour not photography was his first passion. ‘I studied humour very carefully from a very ...”

“... While US and European economies faltered, Iran’s soared, buoyed by high oil prices. When Henry Kissinger entreated the shah to freeze oil prices in 1975, he refused, and later cited the US government’s ‘threatening tone’ and ‘paternalistic attitude’. It was time, he argued, for the oil-rich nations of the global South – countries ...”

“... 1946, well before McCarthyism, he published a detailed exposé of the American Communist Party in Henry Luce’s Life magazine. In Schlesinger’s telling, the minuscule communist presence in the country had ballooned into a vast left-wing conspiracy. ‘Communists are working overtime to expand party influence, open and covert, in the labour movement, among ...”

“... life, anarchism is not merely true, but a truism. After all, the likes of Saddam Hussein and Henry Kissinger aren’t the likeliest incarnations of Kant’s ‘moral politician’. These grotesques manifest what in private life would amount to a criminal tendency. And given the less than intergalactic psychic distance between political and random ...”