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“... but have not insisted on a right of unilateral military retaliation (this point was made by Niall Ferguson in the New York Times, but not as yet in any op-ed by an American that I have seen); and that in some cases these states may actually know more about their own part of the world than US intelligence does. Beyond the immediate and unforeseeable ...”

“... held the field for quite a few years, but more recent historians have sought to push him aside. Niall Ferguson in The Pity of War (1998) argued that ‘no evidence has ever been found by Fischer and his pupils that these objectives existed before Britain’s entry into the war … All that Fischer can produce are the prewar pipedreams of a few ...”

“... empires that ruled Africa and Asia don’t seem quite as bad. The perplexingly affirmative work of Niall Ferguson and David Armitage scants, if it doesn’t actually trivialise, the suffering and dispossession brought by empire to its victims. More is said now about the modernising advantages the empires brought, and about the security and order they ...”

“... its colonial past are over.’ No matter that Britain had never apologised: like his fellow Scot Niall Ferguson, Brown wanted British people to feel proud of their empire. At a conference in 2006 on ‘the future of Britishness’, Brown outlined an American-style patriotism, provoking even David Cameron, newly appointed as Tory leader, to ...”

“... of his own and his political viewpoint not in the forefront, but the new breed of historian – Niall Ferguson, Andrew Roberts and Norman Stone – all came to prominence under Mrs Thatcher and share some of her characteristics. Having found that taking the contrary view pays dividends they seem to make this the tone of their customary discourse. A ...”

“... justice warriors’ unites figures as seemingly disparate as Mark Lilla, Steven Pinker, Elon Musk, Niall Ferguson and Jordan Peterson. Bernie Sanders’s insurgent campaign confirmed, however, that socialist ideals exist, beyond the experience of communist tyranny, as what John Stuart Mill called ‘one of the most valuable elements of human ...”

“... to the traditional powers had never been seriously in question. To borrow the binary categories of Niall Ferguson, ‘towers’ prevailed over ‘squares’. Hierarchies beat networks. Power prevailed over ideas and arguments. The effort to make sense of this outcome gave rise to one of the most interesting and important intellectual consequences of the ...”

“... is the ultimate force in rolling back terrorism and tyranny.’ In the New York Times magazine, Niall Ferguson urged Americans to re-establish with ‘military force’ the British empire of ‘free trade’ and ‘balanced budgets’. In a cover story, the Atlantic described torture as a ‘necessary evil’. Andrew Sullivan called for the ...”

“... In Niall Ferguson’s panegyric to British colonialism, Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World (2003), Kenya gets just one significant mention. It comes in the introduction, and is a description of his time there as a boy. It was three years after independence, but, happily, ‘scarcely anything had changed’ since colonial days ...”

“... to remain a great power, let alone become a greater one. A similar argument is to be found in Niall Ferguson’s The Pity of War (1998), where he offers a relatively benign counterfactual alternative: If the First World War had never been fought, the worst consequence would have been something like a First Cold War, in which the five Great Powers ...”

“... First World War as a way of expiating the sins of the Third Reich in the Second World War. Again, Niall Ferguson’s provocative and brilliantly argued The Pity of War blames the British foreign secretary, Edward Grey, for dragging his mostly reluctant cabinet colleagues and thus his country into a war that spelled the beginning of the end of the British ...”