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“... unit. Some of the stories obtained this way were trivial, though intrusive: George Michael wept in his jail cell, for example, or a male British Airways worker secretly wore high heels. Others were more serious: security lapses at Heathrow, or equipment shortages in Afghanistan. Almost anything could be obtained if the offer was big enough: in ...”

“... man wandering around a second-hand market is hardly that of a creative genius at the height of his powers. And Browning didn’t set to work immediately after his transcendent experience on the terrace of Casa Guidi. At Rome in the winter of 1860-61 he spent most of his time in the studio of his friend William Wetmore Story, modelling clay figures, too ...”

“... for clemency awaited his decision. Among the applicants, it is reported, were Conrad Black; Michael Milken, of junk bond fame; John Walker Lindh, the ‘American Taliban’; a former Republican congressman jailed for accepting bribes; and a former Democratic governor of Louisiana, convicted on racketeering charges. They were doomed to ...”

“... on the incoming secretary of state, Rex Tillerson, and Trump’s now ex-national security adviser, Michael Flynn. The rhetoric emanating from US politicians and media commentators too seems to be drawn from another era. In November, a murky online group called PropOrNot went full McCarthy by releasing ‘The List’, designed to name and shame – or indeed ...”

“... In the end the Church committee found no smoking assassins’ guns but, as Hersh says, the powers that be employed ‘lots of euphemisms – “who will rid me of this troublesome priest?” kind of stuff’. Ultimately the Church investigation did not have the impact on public policy Hersh had hoped for. ‘The CIA,’ he writes, ‘is still doing ...”

“... to put his own spin on the tragedy – and, indeed, on the romance. Within days of the car crash, Michael Cole – al-Fayed’s ultra-Brit PR man – was feeding the newspapers sugary tidbits from the couple’s final hours. Diana, he said, had given Dodi a pair of cufflinks that had once belonged to her father. Dodi had responded with a ‘Tell me ...”

“... not to repeat their lèse-majesté. David Landes takes the story from the scholar of Islam, Michael Cook. It is, for him, a moral tale. Autocracies squeeze, steal and demean. ‘Only societies with room for multiple initiatives,’ he insists, ‘from below more than from above, can think in terms of a growing pie.’ That is why they become rich. And ...”

“... the Foreign Office agitated for foreign-language broadcasts to counter the propaganda of the Axis powers. John Reith, the director general, felt obliged to accept an arrangement that, as Potter puts it, ‘included agreeing that news editors would accept specific guidance from civil servants as to which items needed to be included in, or omitted ...”

“... politics. He doesn’t mention either that it was Obama who, as Moyn has put it, ‘enhanced the powers of a presidency, which is now in the hands of a charlatan’, or that in his effort to appease the Republican far right, Obama deported immigrants at a higher rate than Trump has so far. Macron, another of Mounk’s cherished liberal democrats, has, while ...”

“... charges, most of which were later thrown out of court. Justifying these arrests, the mayor, Michael Bloomberg, said: ‘Some people think that we shouldn’t allow people to express themselves. That’s exactly what the terrorists did, if you think about it, on 9/11. Now this is not the same kind of terrorism, but there’s no question that these ...”

“... killed men in war, married, had children, and at the moment when he was at the height of his powers and had everything a man could seem to want, he lost interest in life and had to take measures to avoid the temptation of suicide. He began an intellectual quest for meaning, but found meaning instead in the Christian faith of the narod, the common ...”

“... Bagradian is concerned when he isn’t mobilised, given that the empire had joined the Central Powers in war in November 1914. He goes to the district capital to find out why, overhears officials, including the provincial governor, discussing Armenians in sinister fashion, and is finally warned of the imminent danger by an old Muslim family friend. It’s ...”

“... some argued that Africans were naturally inferior to whites, planters feared they would lose their powers to enslave when their workers became Christians. If African slavery came to dominate the labour systems of the Americas for pragmatic rather than ideological reasons, we might wonder when ideology – and theories of race – entered the picture. Davis ...”

“... the scale, theorists of humanitarian intervention from Harvard or Princeton like John Ruggie and Michael Doyle, speaks for itself. But since the real work of the UN is the manufacture not of actions but of legitimations, the two key figures were the set’s ventriloquists, who wrote the speeches and articles furbishing the secretary-general with his ...”

“... it into social democrats whom Washington can work with, and demagogues who must be contained. As Michael Reid, an editor at the Economist, puts it, it is ‘hard to overstate what is at stake in this ideological rivalry, this battle for Latin America’s soul’ between liberal democrats and a new generation of knights errant who have learned to manipulate ...”