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“... the hundreds of thousands of deaths in Iraq, but ‘can’t regret the decision to go to war’. George W. Bush was ‘a true idealist’. Even Silvio Berlusconi comes in for praise. Blair did, however, lambast himself for one decision made in office:Freedom of Information. Three harmless words. I look at those words as I ...”

“... routinely invoked for the World Trade Center site in lower Manhattan, ‘sacred ground’, was, we recall, coined at Gettysburg.) Elsewhere in the same day’s newspaper, we read that the developer of the WTC site has been handed a significant financial defeat by his insurers; that a critical stage has been reached in the ...”

“... they had to hold their tongues. Guantánamo is still open, and Obama’s main alterations to Bush’s foreign policy have been to scrub off its veneer of recklessness and to innovate in the area of remote-control massacres (sometimes of American citizens) and killing men in pyjamas. Wall Street donors may have abandoned Obama, but that wasn’t because ...”

“... Colin Powell’s service to the cause of regime change wasn’t confined to Iraq. George W. Bush got him to chair his Commission for Assistance to a Free Cuba, which in 2004 produced a report suggesting ways to undermine the Cuban government and replace it with a system of ‘open market’ capitalism and multi-party elections ...”

“... enrichment altogether, or the UN Security Council, which imposed a series of sanctions. Both the Bush administration and Israel made clear that they hadn’t ruled out taking military action to disable Iran’s nuclear programme.But there were other voices. In an article in Foreign Affairs, Richard Haass, a former head of policy planning at the US State ...”

“... in 2005 by the head of a visiting delegation from the Chinese Academy of Sciences: ‘Why when we ask about Third Way, everybody laugh or smile?’ To many of his critics, and even some of his supporters, what was most irritating about Blair was not his seeming naivety but his sanctimoniousness. How could a prime minister who proclaimed that his ...”

“... are American Patriot missiles sent up to intercept the incoming Scud. ‘This picture I sent to George Bush,’ says Mayor Nachman, standing beside the photograph like a television weatherman next to his chart. ‘You know why I wanted him to see it?’ He smiles and looks back at the wall. ‘You see those lights in the distance? That’s Tel ...”

“... might put it, one of those gifts you want to return to the store. As for ‘emotional ballast’, we hear of a child whose ‘sadness, too big for his tiny frame, was like a shadow stunting a plant’s growth’, and of a woman caught in an awkward conversation whose ‘dread built, crows landing one by one in a field’. Characters are compared to ...”

“... moral cost was too high. As the power that first used the atomic bomb under these circumstances, we have sinned grievously against the laws of God and against the people of Japan. In a life of public acts and public speaking, Niebuhr gave a concrete sense to the work of seeing the beam that is in your own eye. He did it characteristically by asking what ...”

“... same, the Conservative Party did not split. In another excellent essay, on the fall of the Lloyd George Coalition, Green lists the main policy reasons why Conservatives turned against the Coalition. These were the Government’s policies on Ireland, India, the Empire and agriculture; there was also considerable hostility to Lloyd ...”

“... are inscribed the 282 laws of the Code of Hammurabi: pretty much the earliest recorded set of laws we have (centuries older than Exodus, it includes the principle of ‘an eye for an eye’) – at a stretch, it might almost be called the world’s first written constitution. There’s a picture of it in the British Museum, near the Stela of Nabonidus. Made of ...”

“... Acharnians, by S. Douglas Olson, was published recently (Oxford, £65), in time for George Bush not to read it before he blunders into Iraq. Aristophanes’ earliest surviving comedy was first performed in 425 BC, six years into the Peloponnesian War. The causes of the war were, as causes of war are, complicated. According to Thucydides, as ...”

“... only in zoos. In the two hundred years since industrialisation – a geological millisecond – we’ve increased the concentration of carbon dioxide in the Earth’s atmosphere by 35 per cent; a third of that has appeared in the last four decades. Carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases, such as methane, trap heat that would otherwise radiate into ...”

“... targeted demographic in the country. In 1992, Ross ‘Clean out the Barn’ Perot and his United We Stand America followers looked for a while as if they were going to up-end the two-party system, with Perot leading George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton in the midsummer polls. In 1996, Pat ...”

“... victims here to prove that ‘America is already great,’ ‘love trumps hate’ and ‘we’re stronger together.’ These were the convention’s three slogans. The first is risky in a country with evident self-esteem issues. The second puts the opponent’s name at its centre. The last doesn’t appeal to individualists who think they’re ...”