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“... In the two decades before 1914 Englishmen probably worried more about the future and safety of their country and empire than they had done since Napoleon’s time. The cosy assumptions about British world supremacy which permeated the likes of Palmerston and Macaulay no longer seemed valid in a period of great international change. At sea, the supremacy of the Royal Navy was ever harder to maintain now that three, four, six foreign powers were building new battle fleets ...”

“... conservatives as well as liberals at the end of Reagan’s expensive two terms in the White House, Paul Kennedy suggested that like other great powers before it, the United States was dissipating the resources that had made it great. It was in ‘imperial overstretch’. And its political system, like that of Britain earlier in the century, would make the ...”

“... skilful secretary general, the General Assembly has been able to pull its weight. Its founders, as Paul Kennedy observes in The Parliament of Man, had envisaged the UN being run by a glorified international civil servant, much as the League was. They weren’t disappointed in the heavy-set Norwegian installed as its first head, Trygve Lie. As minister of ...”

“... be employed for the protection of merchant shipping. The Admiralty also comes out badly from Paul Hayes’s analysis of its pre-1914 plans for a sudden descent on Germany. But for the resistance these plans encountered, he writes, ‘the catastrophe of the Gallipoli campaign might instead have been enacted in Friesland. The effects on morale, prestige ...”

“... ours rested not so much on military prowess as on economic primacy.’ The last chapters of Paul Kennedy’s epic study suggest that American power is subsiding relative to other powers rather than dying. Vidal sees himself as the literary chronicler of the rise and decline of American power. His latest novel begins as the Spanish-American War of ...”

“... disintegrated not because it was corrupt, but because it suffered from, and embodied, what Paul Kennedy might call imperial overstretch. The cause of the Empire’s decline and fall was ‘in a sense, its very existence’ (Craddock). Eighteenth-century Europe, by contrast (for Gibbon did not foresee Napoleon), was secured and stabilised by its ...”

“... is interested in are only so much marginalia when set beside the brute fact of US naval hegemony. Paul Kennedy’s account of the naval history of the Second World War makes this clear. For Kennedy the main story of the war at sea is the ascent of the US, having started out as one naval power among many, to ‘naval ...”

“... or two, the people wake up, and the ship of state slowly rights itself. The British historian Paul Kennedy, in The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, published in 1987, offers a very different view. This is not the story of twenty to thirty-year cycles of intervention and laissez-faire, but of two to three hundred-year cycles of imperial ascendancy ...”

“... for instance? Why not government policy and structure – a factor highlighted recently by Paul Kennedy in his argument that the USA’s division of powers precludes the single-minded policies that might be necessary for industrial regeneration? Still, the virtues of the book outweigh its defects. It demonstrates that government does have a ...”

“... operations, two of whom, James Wisheart and Janardan Dhasmana, were struck off even before Ian Kennedy’s report was published. The problems at the infirmary had become public largely through the efforts of Stephen Bolsin, a consultant anaesthetist with an interest in clinical audit, a process in which clinicians’ outcomes are measured. Bolsin became ...”

“... of Sea Power upon History (1890), we might stress the derring-do of the Royal Navy, or – as Paul Kennedy did recently – the role of public finance. Brewer concentrates on organisational factors, and isolates three that were crucial. First and foremost, Britain’s army and navy trebled in size in the century after the Glorious Revolution. By the ...”

“... October 1962 was not August 1914 because John Kennedy had learned the lessons of Munich, which may be summarised as follows: get angry in private, think before you speak, say what you want, make clear what you’re prepared to do, ignore bluster, repeat yourself as often as necessary and keep the pressure on. Where Kennedy learned the mixture of forbearance and resolution which lies at the heart of international peace and good marriages is a mystery; his mother and father were no better at solving problems than Neville Chamberlain and Adolf Hitler ...”

“... My problems began​ in 1984 when I wrote letters to Francis Pym and Sarah Kennedy about the Falklands War and Sir Robin Day’s part in it. Sarah was presenting a radio programme and I thought she was talking about me when she spoke of a young man who had just lost his mother. Francis Pym said, ‘Guns fire from Number 10’ on the Sarah Kennedy show ...”

“... against Mitt Romney. It was 1994, I’d turned 18 two weeks before, and Romney was challenging Ted Kennedy for the Massachusetts Senate, a seat he’d held since 1962. I lived in Hopkinton, a small town that over the course of my childhood was turned into a bedroom community for lawyers, bankers and software engineers. They bought McMansions in its acres of ...”

“... paid off. Trump filled Scalia’s seat with Justice Neil Gorsuch. Soon after, Justice Anthony Kennedy retired. At 81, Kennedy was older than a Supreme Court judge should be; but he wasn’t ill (and is still alive). Nevertheless, he decided that President Trump and the Republican Senate were the ones he wanted to ...”