“... technology has shifted, making it possible for a small band of zealots to wreak devastation where we least expect it – not a plane next time, but perhaps an atomic bomb in a suitcase or a biotoxin in the water supply. The attack of 11 September is the prototype of similar events that will litter the 21st century. ...”

“... those who’ve been there say: ‘My God! The drive from the airport!’ They mean the drive from George Bush Intercontinental Airport, down Interstate 45 or 59. It’s a ten or 12-lane highway, flanked by teeming feeder roads, and you career along it to the gathering rhythm of power pylons, used car lots, motels, the cacophony of billboards selling ...”

“... weapons. ‘This takes us back to the Cold War,’ he announced cheerfully, ‘where at one point we had thirty thousand nuclear warheads and missiles to launch them’. ‘Welcome to the world of strategic analysis, where we program weapons that don’t work to meet threats that don’t exist.’ This was what Ivan ...”

“... and I questioned some of the Marines. I was made to realise that this is war – and this is what we do.Harris gives the camera a funny look, half shy, half guilty, all of him doubtful that we can understand. It reminded me of the opening of Hiroshima Mon Amour (1959), where the French woman talks about all she has seen in ...”

“... the way our minds work. Why, asked the 19th-century German physician Hermann von Helmholtz, do we see coloured patterns when we press on our closed eyes? Why do amputees still feel their missing limbs? Why is there a blind spot in our vision, and how is it that we don’t perceive ...”

“... a significant political influence: they are places, one protester told me, ‘for seeing how many we are, and how strong we can be together’. As the March protests gathered force, the clubs closed to encourage patrons to demonstrate instead. Andro Eradze, founder of the LeftBank club, was careful to stress that there was ...”

“... as natural to enjoy foreign goods as our own local products … Our city is open to the world, and we have no periodical deportations in order to prevent people observing or finding out secrets which might be of military advantage to the enemy. It was also Pericles, however, who brought in a law forbidding foreign-born Athenians from claiming full ...”

“... overflow in North Carolina, President Trump says that Hurricane Florence is ‘one of the wettest we’ve ever seen, from the standpoint of water’. (In North Carolina 9.7 million pigs produce ten billion gallons of manure a year.)*President Trump says: ‘I hope to be able to put this up as one of my crowning achievements that I was able to expose something ...”

“... think of himself as a ‘liberal’ and still be a committed Cold Warrior. As he says, ‘whether we had a right – any more than the French before us – to pursue by fire and steel in Indochina the objectives our leaders had chosen was a question that never occurred to me.’ His parents were professionals, of Russian Jewish ancestry but born in the ...”

“... bitch,’ he said. ‘This muthafucker is brand new. I want the goddamn thing to work. We’re sure gonna need its ass when we get to New Orleans.’ Sam’s neighbour had chickens outside his trailer and frogs were hiding in the pine trees along the drive. An American flag hung limply on the porch as Sam ...”

“... up firing into the air and announced that the compound was going to be their new headquarters. ‘We complained to an American patrol but the police said we were members of the Mehdi Army,’ said Khadir Abbas Jassim, standing beside a heap of broken furniture and brightly coloured toys which the police had tossed into the ...”

“... truce) or a hudna, a longer-term truce, obviously implies recognition. Khalid Mish’al states: ‘We are realists,’ and there is ‘an entity called Israel,’ but ‘realism does not mean that you have to recognise the legitimacy of the occupation.’ The war on Gaza has killed the two-state solution by making it clear to Palestinians that the only ...”

“... and incursions across the Sabah and Sarawak borders. In contributing to Malaysian self-defence, we were honouring the terms of a treaty that formed part of the UK’s national defence policy. The same applied to the soldiers from Australia and New Zealand who served alongside us. The United States was, at the time, preoccupied with Vietnam, to which Harold ...”

“... submissions of 11 of his senior lieutenants. The censors tried to excise Saddam’s claim that ‘Bush is the real criminal,’ failing only because they didn’t understand how the sound equipment worked. US officials made little effort to hide the fact that they were running the trial, and that the target audience wasn’t Iraqi. The only foreign reporters ...”

“... The Congress of People’s Deputies, the new parliament of the Soviet Union, was in session and we were hearing its elected members voting freely, unpredictably, without fear. The voice – strong, lively – belonged to the man in the chair, Mikhail Gorbachev. I remember leaning back against the window, my heart suddenly too big for my chest. So it was ...”