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“... not merely a bizarre American product, although he is that too. Perhaps the greatest strength of Friedman’s book is that Kahane is firmly placed in the history of the radical Zionist Right. Kahane’s father was born in Palestine and he was an active member of the American branch of the Revisionists (Jabotinsky once visited the Kahane home). The massacre ...”

“... it aroused feelings of alienation, the sense of being an exile in his own land. For Thomas Friedman, a Jewish American journalist, the refugee camp atrocities produced ‘something of a personal crisis’ and tore away ‘every illusion’ he had ‘ever held about the Jewish state’. And for Robert Fisk, who no ...”

“... Fêted by financiers, mobbed by the media, patronised by presidents and prime ministers, Milton Friedman had at last arrived. The doctrine for which he had fought – initially almost single-handedly – for a quarter of a century had become the New Orthodoxy. Monetarism had overthrown discredited Keynesianism, and nowhere was its victory more warmly ...”

“... Thomas Friedman is so much the kind of American that the rest of the world likes to despise that it’s a fair assumption he has, at least in part, adopted the pose consciously. He calls himself a ‘tourist with attitude’ and his attitude is that of the know-it-all, ‘wise up, you dumb cluck’ American journalist who is here to tell you your economy is blown, your politics stink and you haven’t a hope in hell of making it in today’s world ...”

“... November 1968, New York University hosted a debate between the economists Walter Heller and Milton Friedman at the Graduate School of Business, a block from Wall Street. The event was advertised as a confrontation between two men engaged in a war for the soul of American economic policy. In retrospect, it might not sound like a clash of the titans – Milton ...”

“... exchange. Like most scholars of the free-market movement, Rodgers assigns great weight to Milton Friedman, ‘the University of Chicago’s most forceful politiciser’, and the right’s answer to J.K. Galbraith. He wrote columns for Newsweek, advised presidents (and dictators), and organised the ten-part PBS series Free to Choose as a counter to ...”

“... Robert Friedman’s Red Mafiya: How the Russian Mob Has Invaded America came out in 2000. Two years before that, in June 1998, he received a phone call from Mike McCall, an FBI agent. McCall warned him that his investigation into Russian organised crime was proving dangerous. ‘I hate to be the bearer of bad tidings,’ McCall said, ‘but a major Russian organised crime figure has taken out a contract on your life ...”

“... one of the few contemporary novels he liked. The book was reviewed in the New York Times by Alan Friedman, the author of a forgotten novel called Hermaphrodeity, who described it as ‘a nearly inscrutable mystery’ powered by ‘camp, vamp and very damp wit’. He praised White’s ‘poetic brilliance’ and ‘hard, gem-like style’ but backhandedly ...”

“... cowering in their consulting-rooms, and better certainly than any political scientist. Take Robert McKenzie, the television psephologist and master of the swingometer, a figure well-known in the Sixties, but now safely dead – and, as we shall see, without heirs who might want to sue on his behalf. A TV producer once had the idea of filming Abse and ...”

“... theory be rejected as a fantasy based on unsound foundations? The classic riposte came from Milton Friedman, who argued that the test of a theory should not be the realism of its assumptions but the precision and success of its predictions. To assume that people are egoists who each maximise what economists call their ‘utility’ (roughly speaking, their ...”

“... Howe and Eudora Welty. These and other signatories – the economist Kenneth Arrow, the poet Robert Penn Warren – were the critical intellectual core, the steady moral centre of American public life. But who, now, would sign such a protest? Liberalism in the United States today is the politics that dares not speak its name. And those who style ...”

“... the potent verses entitled ‘They Receive Instructions against Chile’ (translated here by Robert Bly):But we have to see behind all these, there is somethingbehind the traitors and the gnawing rats,an empire which sets the table,and serves up the nourishment and the bullets.They want to repeat their great success in Greece.Greek playboys at the ...”

“... America’s late 20th-century market revolution originated in Chicago with the likes of Milton Friedman holds true, if at all, for the 1970s and 1980s. But in the last thirty years that story has come to serve more and more as an alibi. In the 1990s the brains behind Clinton and Blair and the Washington consensus were far more likely to be trained at ...”

“... Children Deal with Death, Divorce, Pet Loss, Moving and Other Losses by John James and Russell Friedman, and Bodylove: Learning to Like Our Looks and Ourselves: A Practical Guide for Women by the punctuation-crazed Rita Freedman. Publishing houses in New York, busy, as usual, looking for the hot new writing talent, will expect to find it in the medical ...”

“... a brief postscript to one of the chapters and a few remarks in the preface, George Akerlof and Robert Shiller’s Animal Spirits was written before the current crisis. Yet, based on research undertaken over many years, it can be read as prefiguring the current disillusionment with economics. The trouble with prevailing theories, in Akerlof and Shiller’s ...”