“... not one novel but two. The first is Hystopia, which was published by Faber and blurbed by Richard Ford and is being reviewed right here in front of your very eyes. The second is also called ‘Hystopia’, but this one, as that shift in typography suggests, purports to be a posthumously discovered manuscript by Eugene Allen, a young Vietnam veteran ...”

“... is gross-out comedy? This is transgression? Wasn’t I doing something a whole lot more full-on in Nixon’s first term?’ Yes, he was. It’s also easy to imagine Lenny Bruce watching from the realm of the dead and thinking rather sourly that comedy is all about timing. How is it that one foul-mouthed raging sex-obsessed Jew uses bad words on stage, gets ...”

“... of the phrase ‘national interest’ compounds the difficulty: could it be used to justify Nixon and Kissinger’s carpet-bombing of North Vietnam, or the overthrow of Salvador Allende? To his credit, Kennan understood that most definitions of reality were rooted in emotions and beliefs that might or might not match up with facts on the ...”

“... expression, which Trump, to their embarrassment, has been reckless enough to encourage. Since the Nixon era, Republicans have understood that the party’s plans to favour the white ‘silent majority’ depend on coded language that everyone understands but which can be plausibly denied. Cruz and Hatch may have been distressed by Trump’s response to ...”

“... New Republic and the New York Times Magazine. Public worry intensified until November 1969, when Nixon finally responded by renouncing first use of CBW. Despite the prevalence of systematically faked news and media subservience to the government line, the 32-year-old Hersh felt that he had discovered enough honest and courageous people in government to ...”

“... have already started to raise this issue, stirred up in part by the insulting language used by Richard Perle and his school about the caution of the professional military. As a recent letter to the Washington Post put it, ‘the men described as chicken hawks avoided military service during the Vietnam War while supporting that war politically. They are ...”

“... Back in the Sixties, before he became the bad boy of American philosophy, Richard Rorty struck his colleagues as a safe and promising young man. His first book, published in 1967, was an anthology of Essays in Philosophical Method designed to document the reorientations in analytic philosophy that followed Rudolf Carnap’s move from Germany to the US in 1935 ...”

“... between the US and UK to share codebreaking methods. In his history of the Five Eyes system, Richard Kerbaj goes back to 1938, when an MI5 officer decided to tip off the US embassy in London about a minor German plot to steal secrets from an American colonel in New York. After the culprit was arrested, another MI5 officer, Guy Liddell, travelled to the ...”

“... new, stupidly conferred meaning of ‘lie detector’, it has connotations of the White House and Nixon and Reagan, of the malpractice of ‘hand-in-glove’. The two further references to the polygraph, which occur in ‘Kierkegaard’ and ‘Adorno’, both continue the association with Jefferson (his retirement and his death); both suggest a kind of comic ...”

“... Current events, Superman comics, ads for erotic underwear appear alongside the words of Nixon or Lyndon Johnson, sometimes on their own terms, sometimes as words spoken by characters. A typical instance of the latter occurs when the narrator has been summoned to speak to his soon-to-be ex-father-in-law. ‘He was all for reconciliations, and while ...”

“... and to order their release if they are not convicted. The distinguished South African jurist Richard Goldstone, no friend of terrorism, pointed out at the time that the Security Council’s post-9/11 resolution calling on all member states to legislate along the lines of the Patriot Act of 2001, which permits everything from indefinite executive ...”

“... In a college classroom I played Gil Scott-Heron’s ‘Winter in America’, stirring up my old Nixon-era sense of abjection, and cried in front of my students. Of course, such behaviour makes us eligible for the web-scorn of alt-right triumphalists (‘Anguished by Trump, Lena Dunham Flees to Posh Arizona Resort, Asks Rocks for “Guidance”’). At these ...”

“... for having nationalised them. 25. The principle of ‘excess profit’ was unacceptable to Richard Nixon’s administration. In an Oval Office meeting on 5 October 1971, the secretary of the treasury, John Connally, described the bill Chile presented to Anaconda and Kennecott as a ‘gauntlet’. ‘Now, it’s our move.’ It was then that ...”

“... meaning of ‘plant’, life generated rather than extinguished in a process the academic Rob Nixon has described as ‘slow violence’. Whiteness, seen from a distance. Fifty shades of whiteness, according to the title. Whiteness as ubiquitous and banal, its excess evident in the seepage beyond the black borders of the US. Jaune Quick-To-See Smith’s ...”

“... though it was, and in part because of the restraints imposed on it by Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon, was in retrospect an essential and noble demonstration to the world, and especially to the Communists, that America was determined even under the most daunting circumstances to fight against any expansion anywhere of Communist domination. Howe and Walzer ...”