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“... or representing of war, but the waging of war by means of publicity and representation. Oliver Stone’s JFK is the perfect cinematic coda to such a year. I want to compare two melodramatic scenarios that captured the imagination of American spectators in 1991, and to analyse the impact of these representations on public discourse. The Kennedy ...”

“... have a history and a context. But this is not the sort of answer we get from either D.M. Thomas or Oliver Stone. Their suggestion is simpler. There is no paranoia, or paranoia is everywhere. For Thomas, this means anything goes (‘since fiction is a kind of dream, and history is a kind of dream, and this is both’). For ...”

“... Robert Stone was born in August 1937, nine months after Don DeLillo and three – we’re told – after Thomas Pynchon. Dog Soldiers, his second novel, made his name in the mid-1970s, and since then he has stubbornly held his ground on the upper slopes of American literary life. Fellowships, prizes, grants and commissions have rarely been in short supply, and his later books – from A Flag for Sunrise to Damascus Gate – have been much admired ...”

“... the Tolstoy or Dickens sense, but it’s not Tom Clancy or Dan Brown either. He’s more like the Oliver Stone of American letters: crass, hectoring but passionately interested – and occasionally touched by genius. Charlotte Simmons resembles a very bad Oliver Stone film. Unfortunately, at 676 pages, it lasts ...”

“... after tacked to the fridge. Even in Natural Born Killers, written by Tarantino and directed by Oliver Stone in 1994, which is by far the most brutal of these movies, the violence mainly suggests that everyone and everything is out of control, that no rules apply, and chaos is come again. What interests Tarantino, it seems, is not violence, but ...”

“... will abandon his job and family to take up arms. The EZLN risks its gravitas when celebrities like Oliver Stone queue up to visit Marcos; humourlessry the Government had Nixon pulled from the cinemas. There’s nothing cornier than the foreigners’ congas in the Oventic Aguascalientes, or the EZLN calendar for 1997 with the Thoughts of Sub-comandante ...”

“... of the gap between the public and the private person, American Wife is being contrasted with the Oliver Stone movie, W., in which Bush is portrayed by Josh Brolin as a drunken buffoon who turns his life around, becoming a sober, powerful and born-again buffoon. Sittenfeld, a Democrat and a liberal, may be doing more to humanise the Bush administration ...”

“... concept. When Richardson writes that ‘the only big-canvas film-maker of stature we have today is Oliver Stone,’ he meant it to sting. His essay is full of good lines. (A Hollywood publicist tells him that when he goes out to push a new movie, he feels ‘like the emperor’s new dry cleaner’.) It also contains a fine John Huston joke: ‘These two ...”

“... students, he droned on about football and Neville Chamberlain, unable to make eye contact. For Oliver Stone, who dramatised the event in his clumsy 1995 biopic, this was the moment Nixon received the revelation of what Stone called ‘the Beast’: even though he, the president, may want peace, the system won’t ...”

“... in his Underworld USA trilogy, a world-view out of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion by way of Oliver Stone. Ellroy would have us believe that his intention all along has been to expose misogynistic men for what they are, and yet ultimately his characterisations revert to the same type as those of any other male thriller writer. Pete Bondurant, the ...”

“... though there may well be a sudden flurry of events near the end. In The Blue Guitar our man is Oliver Orme. He ‘used to be a painter’ but he gave it up. (In a taste of strained puns to come, he says: ‘Ha! The word I wrote down first, instead of painter, was painster.’) When we first meet him he is hiding out in his childhood home because his affair ...”

“... factory. Minsk in the late Fifties looked quite new: its stately apartment buildings of yellow stone, its wide avenues, were all built on top of the earlier Minsk, which had been destroyed by the Germans twice – once when they came in, and again when they retreated back to Poland three years later. Mailer draws up an intimate picture of family ...”

“... the fire this time comes in cool, ironic novels like Tom Wolfe’s Bonfire of the Vanities. When Oliver Stone released his satirical movie Wall Street, the business press embraced the slick financial Mephistopheles at the heart of the indictment. ‘Greed is good,’ purrs the villain, Gordon Gekko. Greed might just save that ‘malfunctioning ...”

“... black Britonsmight eagerly return to their countries.’And we meet on a bush trackmarked with stone spikes.I doff my hat to the futureas the natives doff their hats to meeven at a thousand yards’ distance.The Shire Highlands are ours by treatystolen from Nyasa tribes illiteratein our law: price, a gun,some calico, two red caps, other things,at one-tenth ...”

“... had a contingency plan for withdrawal from Indo-China. He became the house intellectual on the Oliver Stone movie JFK, and his work was much cried up by the Schlesinger school of apologetics. Kennedy might have started the Vietnam War, covertly committed men and resources to the war, argued forcefully for the symbolic importance of the war – but ...”