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“... As he neared the end of a recent diatribe against President Bush for plotting war secretly, and in defiance of the US Constitution, the American journalist Anthony Lewis felt impelled to add: ‘None of this argues that George Bush is a bad man. He is not.’ Years ago Roland Barthes wrote about the bourgeois propensity to think in essences, and nowhere is this more evident than in the way Americans think and write about their political leaders ...”

“... the most banal sort of personality. He thought of the pro-am round he’d played years ago with George Walker Bush, back in the days when the future president was merely the affable front man for the Texas Rangers. ‘You know how it is with those Latin players,’ the young Bush told ...”

“... transfers are something that politicians are reluctant to talk about, let alone criticise. It was George Osborne’s promise to cut inheritance tax in October 2007 that spooked Gordon Brown into cancelling a general election, triggering the revival of a Conservative opposition that had until then looked completely out of energy and ideas. The centrality of ...”

“... the US commander in Iraq, prepares to report to Congress on 15 September on the success of George Bush’s ‘surge’, Bush himself is trying hard to talk it up and to discredit the policy of withdrawal. In a speech on 22 August to the Veterans of Foreign Wars National Convention, he resorted to the new and ...”

“... has seemed distasteful, a relic of a less enlightened era of international relations. America, George W. Bush insisted during the 2000 election campaign, had ‘never been an empire’ and had no intention of becoming one. Politicians still shy away from the term. But since the attacks of 11 September 2001, the term ...”

“... the same tweeter added that Obama had ‘lost the popular vote by a lot and won the election. We should have a revolution in this country!’ In fact, Obama won the popular vote, by 51 per cent to Romney’s 47, but in the intervening years Donald Trump – the author of those tweets – has come perilously close to effecting his desired revolution. He ...”

“... what they did to our holy Koran,’ Ali said. ‘Can you read the Koran?’ ‘No. In this village we cannot read or write.’ ‘Did the Taliban take it out and burn it?’ ‘No. It was lying in one of the houses that the Taliban burned when they attacked the village.’ ‘So it was accidental.’ ‘Yes. You see what kind of people the Taliban are.’ He ...”

“... That did it. Just as the 1989 revolutions were removing post-ideological Communism from Europe, George Bush mounted Operation Just Cause. The authors neither endorse nor oppose the invasion, regarding it as the ineluctable outcome of the quarrel between senior and junior partners. In justifying Just Cause, ...”

“... are really the prettiest, nor even those which average opinion genuinely thinks the prettiest. We have reached the third degree where we devote our intelligence to anticipating what average opinion expects the average opinion to be.‘ We are forced to make choices without having the ...”

“... he been hired by the Democratic campaign President Saddam could scarcely have done more to tarnish George Bush’s reputation for foreign policy know-how. Almost every day, it seems, new evidence emerges of Iraq’s continued defiance of Gulf War ceasefire resolutions, whether it is the hampering of humanitarian efforts in the Kurdish north, the hiding of ...”

“... during the past few months, and more anxiously during the past few days, that such a war as we Americans are now engaged in, with such aims, rhetoric, and all-encompassing violence and destruction, could now have been waged only against an Arab-Islamic-Third World country. It does no one in it any credit, and it will not produce any of the great results ...”

“... were providing security to keep the real communist Viet Cong from getting into the act.’ ‘What we are looking for is realism,’ a USIS official reported to Arnett. ‘Two days ago we staged a great attack on a little outpost. We had the men defending it like heroes and their women ...”

“... History never repeats itself, but there are uncanny resemblances between policies of the Bush Administration since 11 September and the way the Government under Abraham Lincoln responded to the crisis of the Civil War in the 1860s. Both Presidents assumed powers that went well beyond what the Constitution seems to allow ...”

“... programme in years may be seriously underestimating the situation and the gravity of the threat. George Bush, November 1990 He tried [12 years ago] to develop a programme – an upgraded Oak Ridge [enrichment] facility in Iraq. Of course he couldn’t. It is too complex for Iraqi science or technology. Khidhir Hamza, June 2002 There may be good ...”

“... out on a quiet spreeFighting vainly the old ennuiAnd I suddenly turn and seeYour fabulous face.We wonder why ‘fighting vainly’ is subtly better than ‘vainly fighting’, we are pleasurably uncertain what ‘a quiet spree’ might look like, and ‘the old ennui’ impeccably captures a rather boastful ...”