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“... capacity for mythmaking rather than the resuscitation of the ‘liberal international order’.George Packer, arguably the most renowned American journalist of his generation, is more aware of the dangers of hagiography than most members of Holbrooke’s mourning party. He wrote a profile of him for the New Yorker in 2009, during Holbrooke’s ‘last ...”

“... to take a while. And the American people must be patient. I’m going to be patient.President George W. Bush, 17 September 2001The Taliban regime already belongs to history.Jürgen Habermas, December 2001I have no visibility into who the bad guys are in Afghanistan or Iraq.Donald Rumsfeld, 8 September 2003I will venture a prediction. The Taliban/al-Qaida ...”

“... in Iraq has been high: Elizabeth Rubin for the New York Times Magazine and the New Republic, George Packer for the New Yorker, Rory McCarthy for the Guardian and James Astill for the Economist have produced great pieces. But even the most energetic analysts cannot move freely. Astill’s longest conversation with an Iraqi in Fallujah was with a man ...”

“... and feminists. On his mother’s side, Schlesinger was a Mayflower Wasp who claimed descent from George Bancroft, the Michelet of American historical writing. His father was a Midwest-born social historian with a German-Jewish background, for whom the prairie populism of the turn of the century was still an animating inspiration. Arthur Senior and Elizabeth ...”

“... his 2009 inauguration – Clinton had done it twice; Kennedy had done it in 1961 – many scoffed. George Packer wondered on the New Yorker’s website: ‘Is it too late to convince the president-elect not to have a poem written for and read at his inauguration?’ He explained: ‘For many decades American poetry has been a private activity, written by ...”

“... mission to bring democracy to the world’s benighted. In The Fight Is for Democracy (2003), George Packer argued that a ‘vibrant, hardheaded liberalism’ could use the American military to promote its values. The subtitle of The Good Fight (2006) by Peter Beinart, the then editor of the New Republic, insisted ‘Why Liberals – and Only ...”

“... societies in history still comes as a shock to some. In a widely circulated essay in the Atlantic, George Packer claimed that ‘every morning in the endless month of March, Americans woke up to find themselves citizens of a failed state.’ In fact, the state has been AWOL for decades, and the market has been entrusted with the tasks most societies ...”

“... was one of the most widely discussed public questions of the late Fifties. It is true that George Headley had been appointed to lead in two matches against England as far back as 1947 (he was unfit to play in the second of them), but no black player had thenceforth been entrusted with this socially significant responsibility. Worrell, a sensitive and ...”

“... announced its determination to expand Nato eastwards, despite warnings by seasoned observers from George Kennan to William Burns (now Biden’s director of the CIA) that to do so would aggravate Russian security concerns. The situation escalated in February 2014 with the Washington-backed coup against Viktor Yanukovych, the gradual takeover of the Maidan ...”