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“... Seymour Hersh belongs to that small group of American newspaper reporters who made national reputations during the Vietnam War and Watergate. He won a Pultizer Prize in 1970 for his exposure of the My Lai massacre. He exposed the secret bombing of Cambodia and the role of the CIA in toppling the Allende regime in Chile ...”

“... life found in Peter Ackroyd’s biography of Eliot or Lyndall Gordon’s or, now, in Carole Seymour-Jones’s book may disagree about the primary cause of the failure of the marriage or the degree of Tom and Vivienne’s responsibility for it, but all of them repeat the same litanies of complaint, distress and need that fill Vivienne and Tom’s letters ...”

“... He discriminates between both periods and authors, drawing out the ‘passion for Heaven’ in Richard Baxter, the ‘clarity and assurance’ characteristic of Watts, Addison’s gentlemanliness, Charles Wesley’s ‘physicality’, Montgomery as ‘the greatest hymn-writer on the difficult subject of prayer’, the whisper and privacy in Keble’s ...”

“... that when Sir Henry Wyatt, father of the poet Sir Thomas Wyatt, was imprisoned in the Tower by Richard III he was fed by a cat which brought him a dead pigeon. In Wolf Hall this piece of family mythology becomes a tale that Sir Henry, on the edge of retirement, relates himself, with a rheumy twinkle of unreliability in his eye. A factually implausible ...”

“... as if it were served up on a plate like John the Baptist’s.A portrait of Katherine’s nephew Richard Sackville may have been intended to mark the lavish festivities, in February 1613, for the marriage of James I’s daughter Princess Elizabeth to Frederick V, the Elector Palatine. Richard – a notorious spendthrift ...”

“... in school – fell victim to the swords of all three.Now this is a fairly routine passage from Seymour Hersh’s new book, ill-advisedly (and unironically) entitled The Dark Side of Camelot:Even aboard Air Force One, the President was forced to wear a stiff brace that stretched from his shoulders to his crotch – the aftermath of an errant poolside grab ...”

“... The world​ needs Seymour Hersh. Without his indefatigable reporting, we would know even less than we do about the crimes committed by the US national security state over the last fifty years. While most of his peers in the press have been faithfully transcribing what are effectively official lies, Hersh has repeatedly challenged them, revealing scandalous government conduct that would otherwise have been kept secret: the My Lai massacre in Vietnam, the domestic surveillance programme run by the intelligence agencies in the 1960s and 1970s, the torturing of prisoners at Abu Ghraib ...”

“... and torturing thousands of others. One of the Americans involved in the plot was Major-General Richard Secord, who had resigned from the air force in 1983 after being accused of improper dealings with a former CIA officer. Secord, who had a long career in special operations, pleaded guilty in 1989 to a felony count for lying to Congress about his role in ...”

“... and found he was good at it, meticulous and with a keen eye for detail. Working with the printer Richard Clay and Sons, he was able to match all details of the original pamphlets, with the exception of the paper stock. His versions, he boasted, were ‘as exact a representation as it has been found possible’, with each ‘printer’s error, dropped letter ...”

“... have the bright idea of taking that pompous phrase literally and pretending that he and his foil, Richard Murdoch, were living in a flat at the top of Broadcasting House. For some reason this fancy captivated the nation, and from it developed a wonderful gallimaufry of imaginary characters – Lewis the Goat, Mrs Bagwash, her daughter Nausea. It established ...”

“... scald craving beggary above the degrees of them both, as is largely seen in the brawling works of Richard Maydeston.’ He thus contributes to the oratory of Protestant dissent which Ted Hughes and Tom Paulin have both evoked as a lost – or at least neglected – strand of the national tradition. Bale blazoned his desiderata as much as he reviled the ...”

“... VIII, 2nd s of Henry VII, qv, S 1509: m 1st, Catherine of Aragon; 2nd, Anne Boleyn; 3rd, Jane Seymour; 4th, Anne of Cleves; 5th, Catherine Howard; 6th, Catherine Parr etc). The authors have made their own compromise, which, as the price of retaining connected prose, offers a highly selective summary of salient events. It is instructive to observe how ...”

“... to having an implosion capability, which it will need to make compact weapons. Yet according to Seymour Hersh, writing in the New Yorker in November, the CIA recently completed an assessment of the evidence for the existence of a secret Iranian nuclear weapons programme. The report, which was based on satellite and other data, concluded that there was no ...”

“... the improvised rockets was ‘unlikely’ to be more than two kilometres. Postol and a colleague, Richard M. Lloyd, published an analysis two weeks after 21 August in which they correctly assessed that the rockets involved carried a far greater payload of sarin than previously estimated. The Times reported on that analysis at length, describing Postol and ...”

“... down in the light of broad day. His assassin was murdered on camera while in maximum security. Richard Nixon’s intimates fed high-denomination dollar bills into a shredder in order to disguise their provenance in the empire of – Howard Hughes? Marilyn Monroe fucked both Kennedy brothers before taking her own life, if she did indeed take it. Frank ...”