On Bob Woodward's "Bush At War"

The bare recitation of facts in an out-moded style of journalism. It was ended in the 1950s by the experience of dealing with Senator Joe McCarthy, when journalists realised how misleading it would be simply to report waht he said without informing the reader about his past falsehoods.

Ian Johnston on Stendahl's The Red and the Black

Ultimately, then, for me, one of the main messages of the novel, to the extent that it has a message at all, is the inability of the narrator to pass any sort of reasonable judgment on his story. Inasmuch as he is clearly a successful member of that society, an affluent, well-educated Parisian, who finds nothing but a certain anecdotal amusement. In the tale, I come to see where the source of the real problems in that society might be - the detached urbanity of the civilised person who doesn't care enough, a person for whom the sufferings he relates are unconnected to him, except as an opportunity for many casual evaluative judgments delivered from a detached and superior position, not the vantage, as in Homer, of a sympathetic objectivity, but rather of a sheltered, uncaring amusement.

Then, too, there's the paradox of his attitude to society. For Julien is fiercely ambitious socially. He ha already made up his mind that, despicable as he finds society, his goals are to rise up in that very society. And in many respects his final failure to achieve what Jane Eyre achieves is, I would maintain, linked directly to the fact that he sets himself inauthentic goals in the first place.

In all of this there is a constant sense of how pathetic Julien really is. His vision of himself as a conquering hero in the Napoleonic mode translates itself into complex but endlessly hesitant, self-reflecting and unsatisfying love affairs, which he describes to himself in military language, a style which simply reminds us just how unheroic these achievements are by comparison.

Tony Judt on France and the US

If you want to understand how America appears to the world today, consider the SUV. Oversized and overweight, the SUV disdains negotiated agreements to restrict atmospheric pollution. It consumes inordinate quantities of scarce resources to furnish its privileged inhabitants with superogatory services. It appears to outsiders to deadly risk in order to provide for the illusory security of its occupants. In a crowded world, the SUV appears as a dangerous anachronism. Like US foreign policy, the SUV comes packaged in sonorous mission statements, but underneath it is just an over-sized pick-up truck with too much power.

Joseph Roth in What I Saw

The great gain to German literature from Jewish writers is the theme of the city. The have discovered the cafe and the factory and the bar and the hotel. Berlin's bourgeoisie and its banks, the watering holes of the rich and the slums of the poor. Sin and vice, the day of the city and the city by night.

The dull sergeant came to represent Germany under Bismarck. Behind the sergeant stood the engineer who supplied him with weapons, the chemist who brewed poison gas to destroy the human brain, and at the same time formulated the drug to relieve his migraine, the German professor who is in fact the most dangerous (and dogmatic) enemy of European civilisation, the inventor of the philological equivalent of poison gas.

Woody Allen

To you I'm an atheist. To God, I'm the Loyal Opposition.

I don't want to achieve immortality through my work. I want to achieve immortality through not dieing.

When I was in school I cheated on my metaphysics exam. I looked into the soul of the boy sitting next to me.

Robert Nozick, "Anarchy, State & Utopia"

Taxation is a form of forced labour. There are only individual people, different individual people, with their own individual lives. Using one of these people for the benefit of others uses him and benefits the others. Nothing more. Talk of an overall social good covers this up.

Mohammad Ali on Vietnam, 1967

Why should they ask me to put on a uniform and go ten thousand miles from home and drop bombs and bullets on brown people in Vietnam while so-called Negro people in Louisville are treated like dogs and denied simple human rights? No., I am not going ten thousand miles away from home to help murder and burn another poor national simply to continue the domination of white slavemasters of the darker people the world over/ This is the day when such evils must come to an end. I have been warned that to take such a stand would put my prestige in jeopardy and could cause me to lose millions of dollars which should accrue to me as champion. But I have said it once and I will say it again. The real enemy of the people or myself by becoming a tool to enslave those who are fighting their own justice, freedom and equality.

If I thought the war was going to bring freedom and equality to 22 million of my people they wouldn't have to draft me: I'd join tomorrow. But I either have to obey the laws of the land or the laws of Allah. I have nothing to lose by standing up for my beliefs. So I'll go to jail. We've been in jail for four hundred years.

Irving Howe on JFK, shortly after the assassination

Would it be sacrilegious to whisper that JFK for all his charm, his style, his intelligence, was not quite the "great president" almost everyone seems obliged to say he was? To enter this dissent in no way affects the grief every decent person feels at the President's death. After all, even not-so-great Presidents, like not-so-great human being in general, have a right to live out the natural course of their lives.

Mr Kennedy performed one deed for which he deserves high credit, and that is the signing of the atom test ban treaty, even though the treaty has more symbolic importance than final bearing, it is valuable insofar as it reflects the desire of almost everyone for an easing of the Cold War. But as for the rest of Mr Kennedy's record, especially in domestic affairs, he was not a firm or innovating liberal, and what is more, he did not particularly claim to be.

He confined himself far too much to legislative and bureaucratic manoeuvring, he did not try to understand the necessity or value of trying to arouse the masses of people to a strongly felt political involvement and participation. His proposals were at best intelligent, but almost entirely insufficient.

And on the critical issue of civil rights, he lagged at first, responded only after a great mass movement of Negroes exerted heavy pressure, and then failed to understadn that there are some issues on which it is better (both morally and politically) to go down fighting than to back away shrewdly.

On Ariel Sharon

Why does Sharon enjoy a 55% approval rating? Because Sharon is the first Prime Minister in many long years who is not being attacked and battered by the interminable reproaches, conspiracies, premises and provocations of Ariel Sharon.

On low interest rates

Interest rates that are low by historic standards are doing strange things to a financial system that is highly deregulated. Note, in passing, the astonishing fact that most of the assets of US financial institutions are not subject to the risk-based capital regime and supervisory conditions that apply to US banks. This is because a high proportion of US financial activity now takes place outside of the banking system, in institutions ranging from non-banks such as GE Capital to giant hedge funds.

John le Carre, Ian Fleming and Joseph Heller

Ian Fleming was a fantasist of England in the post-war period: Carre is no realist. He is a novelist of small defeats and large disillusions, a novelist, in other words, of the period we are living in. (I'm almost tempted to say he is the first novelist of the Cold War and in his novel he has read the Cold War in the light of World War Two - which is, incidentally, a more sensible undertaking than Joseph Heller's Catch 22, which represented World War Two as if it were already the Cold War.)

John le Carre and Elmore Leonard

John le Carre has maintained that for the late twentieth century at least, the spy novel is the central fictional form because it alone tackles the implementations of the hidden agendas that - we suspect, and as the evening news tends to confirm - surround us on all sides. Similarly, Elmore Leonard might argue - if he were given to argument, which he is not - that a novel with some sort of a crime or a scam in it can hardly claim to be an accurate representation of today's reality.

Field Marshall Montgomery on Vietnam

The US has broken the second rule of war. That is, don't go fighting with your land army on the mainland of Asia. Rule One is don't march on Moscow. I developed these two rules myself.

Boris Johnson on racism

Racism is like sewage: something that a civilised society will manage and channel.

Tony Judt on Israel

The problem of Israel is that it has arrived too late. It has imported a characteristically late-nineteenth century separatist project into a world that has moved on, a world of individual rights, open frontiers, and international laws. The very idea of a Jewish state - a state in which Jews and the Jewish religion have exclusive privileges from which non-Jewish citizens are forever excluded - is rooted in another time and place. Israel is, in short, an anachronism.

Didion on Clinton

No-one who has ever passed through an American public high school can have watched William Jefferson Clinton running for office in 1992 and failed to recognise the familiar predatory sexuality of the provincial adolescent - a candidate who arrived at the national scene with a quite identifiable set of mannerisms and attitudes, the residue of a culture that still placed considerable value of playing sports and taking charge and catting around with one kind of woman and idealising the other kind. In other words, no revelations were to be found in this latest soap opera - the Lewinsky affair.

Prestowitz on the Neo-Cons

The imperial project of the so-called neo-conservatives is not conservatism but radicalism, egotism and adventurism articulated in the stirring rhetoric of traditional patriotism. Real conservatives have never been messianic or doctrinaire.

Dave Barry runs for President

Yes, I am running for President. And this time round, I do not intend to be cheated of victory the way I was in the 2000 election when the so-called "US Supreme Court" defying the clear wishes of the American people failed to declare me winner, on the so-called "legal grounds" that I did not receive any so-called "votes".

Stalin on Tito

Everyone imposes his own system as far as his army can reach. It cannot be otherwise.

On Catherine the Great

Catherine's era exulted in artistic magnificence as international intercourse (in every sense of the word). But it also presented a brutal spectacle of government as organised crime.

Philip Stephens on the NY Times scandal

Among modern institutions, only the US Senate and perhaps the Japanese imperial household have a more positive self-image, a stronger conviction of their own weighty contribution to human progress, than the Grey Lady of 43rd Street.

Taki on Blair and Iraq

If I sound angry, I am. Having done away with crime in British cities, having fixed the health service and the transport system, having lowered taxes and made education the best in Europe, he now has time to concentrate on making an Iraqi utopia. What utter crap. The guy had no other way to go. He was elected to fix Britain and, having failed utterly to do so, he has now decided to fix Iraq.

Tony Judt on Robert Kagan

Robert Kagan wants it both ways. At the end of his book he rather limply asks that Americans and Europeans show better mutual comprehension; but the foregoing 100 pages display not just ignorance of the recent European past and current European diversity, but an undertone of arrogant condescension, mixed with a certain amount of humbug. "The problem," he writes, is that "the United States must sometimes play by the rules of a Hobbesian world, even though in doing so it violates Europe's post-modern norms." But the norms that Washington currently violates are its own - there is nothing uniquely European, much less post-modern, about the rule of law or the desirability of peace over war.

Peter Singer on Animal Rights

Lewis Petrivlovich says that our biology turns certain boundaries into moral imperatives and then lists "children, kin, neighbours and species". If the argument works at the narrower circle of family and friends, and the wider sphere of species, it should also work for the middle class: race. If the argument doesn't show race to be a morally relevant boundary, how can it show that species is?

On who got to direct the Coen Brothers films

Joel: I'm about three years older and thirty pounds heavier and I have about three inches on Ethan in terms of reach. But then he fights real dirty. I can beat him up so I get to direct.

Ethan: It's those critical three inches in reach that make the difference.

Robert Dworkin on Affirmative Action

Colourblindness that has no basis in moral principle and helps only to perpetuate social stratification is worse than pointless.

Julian Barnes on Dreyfus

Charles Peguy said the Dreyfus Case confirmed the rule that the victim usually isn't up to the mystique of his own affair. "We were willing to die for Dreyfus," he commented, "but Dreyfus wasn't."

Norman Mailer on the GOP victory in 2000

The Republicans who led the campaign to seize Floridan in the year 2000 are descended from 125 years of lawyers and bankers with the cold nerve and fired-up reed to foreclose on many a widow's home or farm. Nor did those lawyers walk about suffused with guilt. They had the moral equivalent of Teflon on their souls.

Norman Mailer on the Iraqi war

Bin Laden and Hussain were in competition as well. Each would look to control the future of the Muslim world - bin Laden, conceivably for the greater glory of Allah, and Saddam for the earthly delight of vastly augmenting his power. In the old days, in the nineteenth century, when the British had their Empire, the Raj would have had the skill to set those two upon each other.

H L Mencken on Los Angeles

A 1926 piece explaining why Aimee Semple McPherson, the evangelist who has been caught in a love-nest that year, needed Los Angeles to succeed in her holy calling.

...Los Angeles was a pasture fore-ordained for evangelists, and she was the first one to give it anything low enough for its taste and comprehension. The osteopaths, the chiropracters, and other suck quacks, had long marked and occupied it. It swarmed with swamis, spiritualists, Christian scientists, crystal-gazers and the allied necromancers. It offered brilliant pickings for real-estate speculators, oil stock brokers, wire-tappers and so on. But the town pastors were not up to its opportunities. They ranged from melancholy High Church Episcopalians, laboriously trying to interest retired Iowa alfafa kings in ritualism, down to struggling Methodists and Baptists, as earnestly seeking to inflame the wives of the same monarchs with the crimes of the Pope. All this was over the heads of their trade. The Iowans longed for something they could get their teeth into. They wanted magic and noise. They wanted an excuse to whoop.

Bernard Goldberg on Dan Rather

If CBS news were a prison instead of a journalistic enterprise, three quarters of the producers and a hundred percent of the vice-presidents would be Dan's bitches.

Terry Jones on the War on Terror

How can you wage war on an abstract noun?

Joan Didion on 9-11

With the flames still visible over Lower Manhattan, the words "bi-partisanship" and "national unity" came to mean acquiescence to the administration's existing agenda.

Avishai Margalit on Suicide Bombers

Vengeance through suicide bombing has, as I understand it, an additional value: that of making yourself a victim of your own act and thereby putting your tormentors to moral shame. The idea of the suicide bombing, unlike that of an ordinary attack, is perversely a moral idea in which the killers, in acting out the drama of the ultimate victim, claim for their own cause the moral high ground.

On Michael Mann

In Micheal Mann's world of existential working class drama, a man stripped of his profession is nothing. That is what The Insider is all about.

Trollope on Literary Reviews

Of all the reviews, the crushing review is the most popular, as being the most readable. When the rumour goes abroad that some notable man has been actually crushed - been positively driven over by an entire Juggernaut's car of criticism till his literary body may be a mere amorphous mass - then a real success has been achieved.

Alfonso X of Spain

Had I been present at the Creation, I would have given some useful advice for the better ordering of the Universe.

On Trent Lott

Trent Lott is as stupid as Europeans think George Bush is.

From Rubin to Rove

This was the Rubin doctrine - the conviction that, whatever the short term costs, in the end good economic policy will produce its own political reward - whether it was painful measures to reduce the fiscal deficit or unpopular support for countries in financial crisis.

Now we have the Rove doctrine. Karl Rove's prescription that if it feels food electorally, do it. This is why the administration pressed ahead last year with an inappropriate tax cut devised at the peak of the 1990s expansion. This is why tariffs were imposed on imported steel this year, why Mr Bush gleefully signed a corporate reform bill that his economists feared would do more harm than good.