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“... 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 ...”

“... him. Keeping Giuliani away from the boss had long been a key task for the gatekeepers of the Trump White House: lawyers, aides and family members. But once the gatekeepers were gone, Giuliani could say what he liked and be sure of an audience. He told Trump that the way to fight back was to take his case to the courts, and ultimately to the Supreme ...”

“... the classicist Daniel Mendelsohn in the New York Review of Books, who attacked its reliance on white space, on aura. The Sappho of the best-known surviving stanzas was a poet, a singer, whose work Carson tried to re-create, but the Sappho in much of If Not, Winter was (he implied) an illusion, a ghostly projection of our collective relationship to ...”

“... were established to promote creationism. But it was during Carter’s unhappy term in the White House that Jerry Falwell and others built the national political organisations that were to become the vehicles of the religious right. When Reagan was elected in November 1980, the long exile of evangelicals from Washington had come to an end. It would be ...”

“... but also reflecting an incipient musical integration. ‘Country and western is the music of the white masses,’ one contemporary soul musician says to Booth. ‘Rhythm and blues is the music of the Negro masses. Today soul music is becoming the music of all the people.’ But Booth sits in on a 20th-anniversary concert tribute to Stax, and finds that the ...”

“... while his studio team and friends look on; Isabella Blow and the Chapman Brothers are there, and Sam Taylor-Wood (as was), as well as the jeweller Shaun Leane, and Sarah Burton, who would take over the label after his death and made Kate Middleton’s wedding dress. All McQueen’s earliest associates seemed to have stayed with him the whole way: this was a ...”

“... The Stranger (1946) – a frankly commercial production which Welles made for another independent, Sam Spiegel – was the first Hollywood feature to refer to the Nazi death camps, and used newsreel clips. The movie, in which Welles hams shamelessly as a German war criminal hiding out in a New England college town, was severely cut. Callow compares its lost ...”