“... the stream, in punts and a 1920 Studebaker, come Asher’s Jewish ancestors: great-grandfather Sam Korelitz (a hardware store owner) and great-grandfather Jim Zabin (an ad-man), Helene Hanff, uncle Arnold Rothstein (who fixed the 1919 World Series) and Arnold’s friend Fanny Brice. Contrasted with these somewhat comical figures are the anonymous victims ...”

“... culture. Or perhaps they are a red-state art form: patriotic, sentimental, hopelessly unhip and white, full of small-town values, at home in suburban high schools. Unlike jazz and film, which gained respectability as pop and TV supplanted their popularity, the musical holds its own lonely place in culture; it doesn’t quite belong to anyone. Raymond Knapp ...”

“... dressing? Val, the friend of British nationalists, of course.There aren’t enough members of the white race’s vanguard for the uniforms to come from a factory. They have to be home-made. The blue BM crossed-circle came as a machine-embroidered patch, but she was the one who had to get it to work on a khaki shirt, who had to make the jacket and the ...”

“... among ‘fucking queer intellectual bastards’. In no time he and Simon, dressed only in little white towels, are padding through a gay sauna near the Gare de Lyon in search of a young man called Hamed, to whom Barthes might have given a copy of the missing document. Hamed, they’ve been told, has a fringe and an earring, but the steam makes it hard to ...”

“... impossibly beautiful in a range of outfits, including a chest-hugging dark sundress and a clinging white one-piece swimming costume. Her character’s beauty is central to the plot because in the flashback sequences we learn that Sebastian is using her as bait to seduce young men. The script alludes to Catherine’s swimming costume becoming transparent in the ...”

“... are at least a dozen restaurants, one Kurdish, the rest Afghan: the Hamid Karzai Rastorant, the White Mountain, the Three Star Hotel. Khan, an Afghan from Kunduz who bakes bread at the White Mountain, makes €20 a day. Inside the restaurant, men sit, smoke shishas and talk. The Eritreans run a bar and nightclub, a dark ...”

“... other questions didn’t make me doubt for one minute he could read my mind. John Gavin who played Sam in Psycho was Reagan’s ambassador to Mexico. Psycho was the first Hollywood film to show a toilet flush. Encopresis is another mental illness I suffered from. It involves farting. The initials of the history student, now a graduate, began appearing on ...”

“... First World War portrayed the Germans as ‘savage gorillas who threatened the purity of innocent white women’. Hitler seemed not to mind: one witness reported that he was ‘captivated’ by King Kong and ‘spoke of it often’. Indeed, the Führer watched a movie ‘every night before going to bed’. Greta Garbo was among his favourite actresses and ...”

“... we imagine between her face and her mask.’ The images of Doris Day (that blonde hair, those white teeth) and her personas as the spunky girl next door, the tightly wound career woman and the gung-ho housewife have been fixed for years now, but the person who played Doris Day is less clear. It’s difficult even to know what to call her. The band leader ...”

“... Judy and her guide troop, dresses for the Fourth of July parade in the full costume of Uncle Sam, with defective goatee, star-spattered waistcoat and striped, flared top hat. It is a crude notion for Updike, an uncharacteristic piece of underlining, but it gives the symbolic school of Angstrom studies all the footnotes it needs. And if Rabbit Angstrom ...”

“... are the dead’), and the intensely plangent five-part Lamentations of Robert White, who died of plague in 1574, at the age of 36, along with his entire family.9 March. Europe is closing down. Flights are being cancelled. Two LRB editors have plans to go to New York, where the situation is just beginning to kick off. ...”

“... But his collective observations of his jailers – especially the prison’s racial dynamics, with white guards dominating their black colleagues, and a Puerto Rican contingent showing the most sympathy to the jailed – are some of the book’s most striking details. (The broad outline of the abuses Slahi suffered, even the worst ones, has been a matter of ...”

“... lessons when turning the camera on blemishless characters like the Justice for Janitors activist Sam (Adrien Brody) in Bread and Roses, or George in Carla’s Song, or for that matter any of the salt of the earth Sandinistas in that movie. These are not people, they’re mirages of purity conjured up to indict an unfair world, just as the sneering, sadistic ...”

“... government jobs. What with the anonymous cruising sites of Lafayette Park (right in front of the White House) and the company of tolerant female colleagues in the federal bureaucracy, homosexuals managed to turn Washington into a ‘very gay city’. Hoover grew up in DC when it was a racist backwater of the Old South, and despite his own ambiguous ...”

“... both houses of Congress, the NSC, three departments (State, Defense, Homeland Security) and the White House, and in Europe, Nato. Binyamin Netanyahu and Tzipi Livni are among his interlocutors in the Middle East. Most passages in Talking to the Enemy are intended for us, ordinary readers, but some are clearly meant for those in power. Like a lot of ...”