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“... For students of the human sciences, the anthropologist Marshall Sahlins is, with Clifford Geertz, one of the few Americans who has achieved the status of a name to conjure with alongside the French maîtres à penser, particularly when the conversation turns to the topics of ‘Big Men’ (power-brokers who aren’t chiefs, masters of the games of speech and generosity), or the socially embedded economy of premodern societies, ‘negative reciprocity’ (exchange characterised by hard bargaining, predation or theft), the cultural apperception of colour, or why Americans don’t eat dogs ...”

“... by the retirement of the Supreme Court’s only black judge, the highly distinguished Thurgood Marshall. And he went for Thomas, of course, because he was a conservative: a reputed opponent of affirmative action despite having benefited from it both at Yale and in Washington, and a reputed opponent, too, of abortion. I stress ‘reputed’, because neither ...”

“... of these revisionist studies, just published in the United States, is a lengthy academic thesis on George Kennan and the Art of Foreign Policy, by Anders Stephanson, who writes ‘from the viewpoint of a neutralist Swede of socialist convictions’. His book is largely a tireless and, in the end, rather inconsequential examination of inconsistencies in ...”

“... a ‘History of Civilisation’ series, in which it joins such works as Charles Burney and David Marshall Lang’s The People of the Hills: Ancient Ararat and Caucasus (1971) and George Lichtheim’s Europe in the 20th Century (1972). Indeed, the back of Lichtheim’s book announced Lewis’s work as forthcoming, though it ...”

“... those characters move. So, when the 15-year-old Ellen Terry enters the artistic colony in which George Frederic Watts is to paint and later to marry her, the narrative voice becomes a prissy, late Victorian chorus: ‘The atmosphere was curiously liberal. Surely it was not quite fitting that the guests, whatever their rank, should be treated as models for ...”

“... unco-operative’ both on the battlefield and in the management of the war. When Lloyd George pre-empted Wilson’s Fourteen Points speech with one of his own, in which he sketched out a democratic peace based on a British Empire miraculously transformed into a commonwealth of nations, Wilson’s nose was put out of joint and the mood in the White ...”

“... were longer-lasting. In 1861, Ned had become a founding partner in the decorating firm Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Co – an institution that would endure in one form or another well into the 20th century. Around the same time, he succumbed to ‘the natural yearning of mortal man not to be lost in the millions of Joneses’ by adding the name of an uncle ...”

“... across the globe somehow refuse to go on? Whether the design object is Young British Art or George W. Bush, ‘brand equity’ – the branding of a product name on an attention-deficit public – is fundamental, and hence design is too. Consumer attention and image-retention are all the more important when the product is not an object at all. This ...”

“... it wasn’t until 1946 that food and funds and other kinds of aid began to flow into Germany. The Marshall Plan, which poured millions of dollars into Western Europe on the condition that recipient countries accepted the principle and practice of liberal democracy, was intended, in the words of the director of the CIA, Allen Dulles, to fulfil ‘the task of ...”

“... In 1946, George Kennan, then the deputy head of the US mission in Moscow, sent a 5300-word telegram to Washington, hoping to alert his superiors to the threat of Soviet expansionism. Kennan had complained repeatedly and fruitlessly about what he saw as America’s indulgent attitude towards the Soviet Union, but for a crucial moment in 1946 his idea that the US should strike an alliance with Western Europe in order to contain Soviet Communism found listeners in Washington ...”

“... pardons or commutations had not applied to the Department of Justice for clemency. On 2 July 2007, George W. Bush commuted the prison sentence on Lewis ‘Scooter’ Libby, a former chief of staff to Vice-President Cheney. Libby had been convicted the previous March of perjury and obstruction of justice in connection with the leak of the CIA agent Valerie ...”

“... of a United States of Europe in his Zurich speech of 1946, Bevin who was the chief begetter of the Marshall Plan. But European unity was for others: Britain still operated the three intersecting circles, of which the Atlantic and the Commonwealth loomed larger than Europe. We did not refuse economic co-operation with the Continent, as at first ...”

“... was the shopping mall. In a section reprinted here from All that is solid melts into air (1982), Marshall Berman describes the building of the expressway through the Bronx in the 1950s, and the consequent destruction of the borough. Directed by the infamous city planner Robert Moses, the Cross-Bronx Expressway cut through a dozen densely populated ...”

“... representation’). At other times, it’s more like a grand essay in what might be called the Marshall McLuhan tradition, making oracular – if not exactly proven – assertions about the media and modern life. This one alludes to George Trow’s book Within the Context of No Context: The grid of fifty million and the ...”

“... by extension, included. Subsequently, in a similar conversation with the Oxford sociologist Gordon Marshall, Gordon (who is as authentically Scottish as Alastair) describes watching the 1966 World Cup Final on a flickering black and white TV in a pub in a West Highland village. He was one of perhaps a dozen out of forty or fifty blokes who didn’t cheer to ...”