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“... the question of the moment: has the American republic turned into an empire? And if so, should we cheer, lament or simply get on with imperial business? Both describe an empire of material desire, of consumption, of get rich now. You might call it an empire of greed. Steve Fraser is a fine New Deal historian whose biography of the union leader Sidney ...”

“... the Israeli position. One American participant at Camp David in 2000 later said: ‘Far too often, we functioned … as Israel’s lawyer.’ Finally, the Bush administration’s ambition to transform the Middle East is at least partly aimed at improving Israel’s strategic situation. This extraordinary generosity might be ...”

“... I bumped into my brother in the street and we talked about Fintan O’Toole’s book on the beef tribunal. I told him to read it immediately. I myself had stopped both reading about the beef tribunal and eating beef in 1991, after a two-line thing in the Irish Times about cirrhotic calves’ livers being packed by someone, somewhere in Ireland ...”

“... a former member of Kadyrov’s security service confided to me, ‘I kept asking: “How are we going to find the rebels or their caches of ammunition?” And they told me it was a “chain”: we go after someone, and “work” with him until he gives us names, and then we follow ...”

“... world from Russell Hoban’s Riddley Walker, the political ideas from Naomi Klein and George Monbiot. As a result it’s far too cartoonish and second-hand to have any real bite: it’s like looking into a snowglobe for a deep moral message. Like Cloud Atlas, Mitchell’s sixth novel is a globe-trotting, time-travelling extravaganza, divided into ...”

“... many members of the ‘counter-culture’ subscribing, for example, to the gay shibboleth that we’re all perpetually dressed in drag. (That is, we use clothes and manner to fabricate a conventional gender identity that’s inconsistent with the shifting, unconventional nature of our individual desires.) What did matter ...”

“... of the Herero people in the early years of the last century. Part of the horror of Rwanda is that we think of genocide as belonging to an age we had left behind. Gaillard, a medieval scholar, said that the apocalypse in Rwanda was prefigured in the works of Breughel and in the cast of characters consigned to the Inferno in ...”

“... prejudiced in favour of individual over collective judgments. This is hardly surprising, since we are all biased. First, we are biased in favour of our own opinions, which we tend to prefer to those of anyone else. Second, we are biased in favour of ...”

“... of Graham Greene and Gabriel García Márquez) and then under Manuel Noriega (former friend of George Bush), is now firmly back in its control. (As John Major says in the Cambridge History, the Panama Canal has been the ‘outstanding symbol of Washington’s power to dominate the weaker states of the hemisphere’.) It still exercises direct colonial ...”

“... Coupole’. ‘Henry’s gravelly voice let everyone immediately know that he was an American,’ George Whitman, the owner of the Shakespeare Bookshop in Paris, recently recalled. He never turned into one of those phoney American artists around town. Henry was a native American first, although he considered American air-conditioning a nightmare. He never ...”

“... defeat denouncing their pusillanimous leader and unreconciled to their new role as voters. How can we understand these women’s passionate attachment to their own political exclusion? True, some of the overstretched working women of today, rushing to make it to the polls before doing the shopping and picking up the kids, might feel a sneaking admiration for ...”

“... cabinet, and he continued in the government as foreign secretary after the coup that brought Lloyd George to power. Churchill commented sourly: ‘He passed from one cabinet to the other, from the prime minister who was his champion to the prime minister who had been his most severe critic, like a powerful, graceful cat walking delicately and unsoiled across a ...”

“... tide him over during his time in government. In December 2003 the administration trotted out the Bush family consigliere, James Baker, the consummate oilman, as special presidential envoy to restructure Iraq’s $130 billion debt. Baker’s law firm represents Halliburton; Baker Hughes, his oil-services company, was promised the contract to restore ...”

“... own confession, was incapable of telling a lie, and it is not too much to say that the story of George Washington and the cherry tree has done more harm, and in a shorter space of time, than any other moral tale in the whole of literature.’ It is safe to assume that the Oscar Wilde of ‘The Decay of Lying’ would feel far more at home in the America of ...”

“... view of the matter is damned as ‘elitist’. As these attitudes assert and impose themselves, we are encouraged to talk not merely of an aspirational class but of an ‘aspirational society’ at once insistently egalitarian and aggressively competitive. Politicians of all parties are committed to giving the aspirational society more of what it is thought ...”