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“... be going too far for Hobbes, who insisted that the state was merely ‘that Mortall God, to which we owe under the Immortal God, our peace and defence’. But whatever else is true about a world in which such headlines are possible, it is certainly far removed from Hobbes’s original state of nature. The forgetfulness or otherwise of the French about what ...”

“... lap around his precocious career as a hotshot critic, magazine editor and merchant of ideas (what we would call today, if we hadn’t any shame, a thought leader). Putting extra pep into Podhoretz’s trot is the beaming knowledge that his success transcends that of mere mortal scribblers and red pencillers. To borrow from ...”

“... journalist that the Republican Party had always been all about surviving and staying on course. ‘We’re shocked,’ he said, ‘but we’ll go about our business.’ He was wearing a blue cap that said: ‘Trump. 45th President’. He then spoke to CBS. ‘Someone else died – we’re ...”

“... to make anybody spew. An early duty, in the face of this array of sanctimony, is to the obvious. We are not disputing the case of Salman Rushdie because it reminds us of everything else under the sun. We are disputing it because it is unique and unprecedented. I write it down in a verse, before it gets buried in ...”

“... every time I saw the word ‘Golf’. (I urge you not to surrender to this weakness, as George Bush is said to have done.) Reminders of the outcome of that unpleasantness are everywhere, most noticeably in the omnipresence of the Syrians who seized the chance occasioned by their participation in the all-annealing Desert Storm to legitimise then ...”

“... did Fuller say that Obama was ‘pressing down the same path of failure in Pakistan marked out by George Bush’ and that military force would not win the day, he also explained to readers of the Huffington Post that the Taliban are all ethnic Pashtuns, that the Pashtuns ‘are among the most fiercely nationalist, tribalised and xenophobic peoples of the ...”

“... a few months ago I put on a suit and went to Westminster to meet a senior Conservative MP. ‘We’re all on a journey,’ he told me when I asked whether his beliefs had changed, ‘all of us.’ Then, as an example of the ‘quality and range’ of the party’s new parliamentary candidates, he began to tell me about Wilfred Emmanuel-Jones. I hadn’t ...”

“... In the early months of George Bush’s Presidency, before his reassuringly innocuous pronouncements and prudent compromises at the Nato summit had allowed the American media to discover prophetic qualities in him, editorial pages were much occupied by pundits clashing over what Bush, during the electoral campaign, had plaintively labelled ‘the vision thing ...”

“... Four years ago, on 28 January 2003, in his State of the Union address to Congress, George Bush referred to the prisoners – more than ten and a half thousand of them – the United States had taken into custody in the course of the war in Afghanistan and the so-called war on terror. Not all were in prison, he said: some had been ‘otherwise dealt with ...”

“... ever-distant telos his arrival at which will represent the revelated transformation of a present we stomach by looking beyond.’ Over the same period, however, things were starting to go wrong for Wallace. In the Lipsky interview he concedes that he was drinking and that he smoked a lot of marijuana, but It was more just like, I got more and more unhappy ...”

“... the reader towards an odd style of religiosity. Nor is this just a side effect: it is this that we are really being invited to ‘join’ – empowerment through faith, via spiritual transport. You’ll have to tell them frankly you can’t explain Why Nineveh is still standing though you hope to learn At the feet of a prophet who for all you know May be ...”

“... meanwhile, pressures were mounting to deal with long-deferred domestic priorities. Neither George Bush nor Bill Clinton nor Boris Yeltsin could claim the authority in foreign affairs that Reagan and Gorbachev had commanded during the mid-Eighties – or, for that matter, their ability to think ahead, however superficially, about where they would ...”

“... law. The Kurds’ deal looked far worse, until television pictures of their plight embarrassed the Bush Administration. Bush had already been seen to betray them: on 15 February 1991 he called for an uprising; on 23 March he decided to allow Iraq to deploy the helicopter gunships that suppressed them and restored Baathist ...”

“... A key justification of the Bush administration’s purported strategy of ‘democratising’ the Middle East is the argument that democracies are pacific, and that Muslim democracies will therefore eventually settle down peacefully under the benign hegemony of the US. Yet, as Andrew Bacevich points out in one of the most acute analyses of America to have appeared in recent years, the United States itself is in many ways a militaristic country, and becoming more so: at the end of the Cold War, Americans said yes to military power ...”

“... of this extraordinary affair were rather different. There was, first and foremost, President Bush’s unpleasant determination to play fast and loose with the calibre and standing of the Supreme Court. I say this not because he allowed partisan considerations to sway him in his selection of Judge Thomas: that was only to be expected. Virtually every ...”