And what voices! A sort of over-fedness, a fatuous self-confidence, a constant bah-bahing of laughter about nothing, above all a sort of heaviness & … - Thomas E. Ricks

England is the most class-ridden country under the sun,” Orwell charged in “The Lion and the Unicorn.” “It is a land of snobbery and privilege, ruled largely by the old and silly.” Yet

As the sociologist Ann Swidler has observed, “common sense”is really just deeply embedded culture: “the set of assumptions so unselfconscious as to seem a natural, transparent undeniable part of the structure of the world.

especially in the key task of translating broad strategic concepts into feasible operational orders. Marshall understood that Eisenhower had a talent for implementing strategy. And that job, Marshall believed, was more difficult than designing it. “There’s nothing so profound in the logic of the thing,” he said years later, discussing his own role in winning approval for the Marshall Plan. “But the execution of it, that’s another matter.” In other words, successful generalship involves first figuring out what to do, then getting people to do it. It has one foot in the intellectual realm of critical thinking and the other in the human world of management and leadership.