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“... decisions on the basis of professional insight. This elitist element should be kept in mind as we turn to consider the House of Lords, which is, of course, no less elitist. Putting the hereditary nobility to one side, the life peers, and especially the cross-benchers, carry on an older, less narrowly professional tradition of distinguished service: rule by ...”

“... as such. It did not occur to me that any of the discussions taking place might be reported to George W. Bush or the FBI – though one can never be too sure of that these days. If there had been an attempt by the Bush regime to ban this coffee house as a hotbed of sedition, or to send ...”

“... who today seems most like a real President is Martin Sheen, who plays one in The West Wing.1 George W. Bush – the less real real President – has settled for the part of a B-movie cowboy, and takes his role very seriously. Only the other day he was talking about ‘riding herd’ with the Middle East peace ...”

“... than his revelation – in January 1990 – that in mid-March 1989, three months after Lockerbie, George Bush rang Margaret Thatcher to warn her to ‘cool it’ on the subject. On what seems to have been the very same day, perhaps a few hours earlier, Thatcher’s Secretary of State for Transport, Paul Channon, was the guest of five prominent political ...”

“... Among the more reasonable demands we make of our fellow human beings is that they treat us with respect. ‘Just a little bit’, as Aretha Franklin sang and sang again, seems to go a long way. Few exchanges among people appear to cost those who offer it so little and benefit those who receive it so much. ‘Why, then,’ Richard Sennett asks, ‘should it be in short supply?’ Though Sennett frequently defines such scarcity as a lack of ‘mutual respect’ – as if none of us, no matter who we are, gets enough of it – a good many of his examples and much of his analysis focus on welfare recipients, inhabitants of public housing and others vulnerable to being demeaned by a particular kind of dependence on bureaucratic institutions and their representatives ...”

“... cradle? Did the conflict that Washington calls the Persian Gulf War end on 28 February 1991 when George H.W. Bush declared a unilateral ceasefire? Or did that ceasefire signify little more than a pause in a conflict with Iraq that would, in the end, persist for another twenty years? The answers to these questions not only ...”

“... of the introduction to Krier’s latest book, is the architect of the presidential library of George W. Bush, now under construction in Texas. And Krier has disciples everywhere from Florida to Romania. He is the father of what his American followers call the New Urbanism, of which the Prince of Wales’s development ...”

“... sense of it,’ Julius reflects at the novel’s beginning, and Danielle concludes at its end: ‘We’re all of us entitled. Comparatively, I mean. We’re so lucky we don’t know we were born.’ These are the children of the novel’s title. The ...”

“... the Olympics. This particular visionary wrote to Ronald Reagan that he loved America ‘because we have about two hundred flavours of ice cream’. ‘That’s America,’ the President observed. ‘Everyone with his or her vision of the American promise.’ The charm of the anecdote was its complete vacuousness: no tale of harrowing escape, no Horatio ...”

“... 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 Liberals ...”

“... In the final year of the last century, George Stephanopoulos, Bill Clinton’s one-time aide and press secretary, published a memoir of his time in the White House entitled All Too Human: A Political Education. Back then, it seemed like a terribly exciting book: 1999 was the year of Clinton’s Senate trial, following his impeachment, and also of the first appearance on US television of The West Wing, which offered the fantasy of a different kind of liberal president ...”

“... exemplifies the rise of the idea of freedom as a white prerogative. It’s also the birthplace of George Wallace, one of the most influential political figures of the 20th century, who struck electoral gold by claiming that an alliance of the federal government and the civil rights movement was undermining the freedom of whites. Cowie uses Barbour to describe ...”

“... course of action in Somalia, and as one person involved in the mission planning put it, “We didn’t capture him because it would have been hard to find a place to put him.”’ In other words, the administration doubled-down on what look suspiciously like extrajudicial executions, faute de mieux, after shuttering ...”

“... was seeking to recover from genocide when some rivers in Oxfordshire had burst their banks. How we laughed. This is governmental politics in action: poisonous, hypocritical, fatuous and absurd. It is hardly surprising that many of those with the most direct interest in helping countries like Rwanda would prefer it if politicians like Cameron kept away. He ...”

“... whose appetite for wars can only frustrate Trump’s announced purpose to withdraw from the wars we are already in. The extent to which this president understands so basic a fact about a government he nominally leads is hard to gauge. But in the Trump presidency so far, the underlying condition is chaos – renewable by whim, chance or microscopic ...”