“... to bless or curse my luck when he leaned forward, patted my kneecap and fluted: ‘I believe that we shall be such friends. I have two consuming interests – Adolf Hitler and Oscar Wilde.’ Only hours later, or so it seemed to my disordered fancy, we were sitting in a villa that had once housed the Nazi embassy, while he ...”

“... the earth move. If you were Jeffrey Archer would you not have understood from all of this that we live in a world where the relationship between fact and fiction is fundamentally altered and traditional concerns about media manipulation of public events are hopelessly naive. Such fears assume a distinction between events on the one hand and their ...”

“... 2010,’ says Nabil Sukkar, an American-educated former World Bank economist in Damascus, ‘we will be net importers of oil.’ Half the population is under the age of 20. Unemployment is already 25 per cent, and the job market is not absorbing the 300,000 young people joining it each year. ‘Children are our only export,’ lamented a businesswoman ...”

“... Side, and unsurprisingly (have you met people who run daycare centres?) was faultlessly organised. We left on time, loaded with water, clear plastic backpacks and the adult equivalent of goldfish crackers, and rolled up in DC with hours to spare. If I didn’t have a sign with me, I had a daughter – just like another several hundred thousand women in this ...”

“... very least curious about his methods. One of the ‘Generation of Giants’ that gave its name to George Dunne’s classic study of the first Jesuit missionaries in China, Ricci remains a figure of enduring fascination both in China and in Europe, often used as a model of how mutual respect can be shown between intellectuals from different cultures. Ricci is ...”

“... Oliver North recruited convicted narcotics smugglers to run the secret war against Nicaragua. George Bush recruited Manuel Noriega to the CIA. As the Watergate hounds closed in, Henry Kissinger was implored to sink to his Jewish knees and join Richard Nixon in prayer on the Oval Office carpet, and complied. Klaus Barbie was plucked from the SS ...”

“... American right. He was later invited for a secret rendezvous at the White House, having found in George W. Bush an enthusiastic if not critically acute reader.Fiction fed on reality. The FBI attributed $43 million worth of damage to the two most prominent environmental action groups – the Earth Liberation Front and the ...”

“... the United States’. She proved a disappointment. Profanity was not her style. As for incitement, we learn from one informant – a chaplain’s assistant – that she thought it ‘would not help the cause of peace’. He added that nothing she said ‘could be construed to be undermining the US government’. The government got desperate. At Cleveland ...”

“... or, even more shameful, the US abandoned a small ally it had solemnly sworn to defend. ‘If we are driven from the field in Vietnam,’ President Johnson had pledged in July 1965, ‘then no nation can ever have the same confidence in American promises or American protection. We will stand in Vietnam.’ Uncomfortable ...”

“... Ronald Reagan had to suffer exposure in the Iran-Contra affair, complete with a televised apology. George Bush, the one recent President who avoided any serious investigation or humiliation while in office, was instead punished more harshly in the 1992 election – the voters found him too aloof, much too certain of his right to lead. Had he been humbled ...”

“... heard that military personnel were now carrying ‘talking point’ cards with phrases such as: ‘We are a values-based, people-focused team that strives to uphold the dignity and respect of all.’ I heard that 47 per cent of Americans believed that Saddam Hussein helped plan 9/11 and 44 per cent believed that the hijackers were Iraqi; 61 per cent thought ...”

“... We should have to contend with the ordinary Englishman’s almost innate dislike and suspicion of “Europeans” ... Intensive re-education would be needed to bring this section of the public to realise that in the modern world even the United Kingdom cannot stand alone.’ The words are those of a committee of civil servants convened to advise the Macmillan Government in 1960 on the pros and cons of joining the ‘Six ...”

“... three days and promise to reject violence; and he threatened to crush them if they didn’t. George Bush called it ‘a defining moment’ for the new Iraq. This time Bush may be right; although, once again, he may not understand the seriousness of the fight he is getting into. The Shia community is splitting ...”

“... insurance agent who comes to the house to investigate the loss of one of Mrs Tennant’s rings, we have ‘foolitlineth’, ‘mutlit’ and ‘’iglily ditlitrething’ in the space of a few paragraphs. The problem, as anyone who has ever used a scanner will have guessed, is that even the best optical character recognition (OCR) software sometimes gets it ...”

“... The Gamble covers the ‘surge’ that pulled Iraq back from the edge of the abyss. By 2006, with Bush still insisting that the war was going swimmingly and the Pentagon keen to hand the war over to the Iraqis, it seemed that the US was heading for a catastrophic defeat. If it proceeded with plans to pull out, many observers felt certain that Iraq would ...”