“... which pits the hero against a wing of the FBI with near-double-O dispensation, as well as a Washington super-lawyer, the pistol-packing Supreme Court judge, an arms-smuggling, ex-CIA villain and a small platoon of hit-men – turns on an elaborate chess riddle in which the black pieces stand for black men and the white pieces for white men. The riddle ...”

“... but a guy liked to have good hair. Then some magic descended on him, and the magician was John Huston, who wrote the script for High Sierra (1941). It’s the story of a veteran gangster, Roy Earle, who wants peace and a new life. But as he comes out of prison, the girl he likes dumps him and he’s on the hook for one more job. Huston saw him ...”

“... how Richard Scott, Laurance’s cousin and the chairman of the Scott Trust, flew to London from Washington on what my old employers would have called a ‘mercy mission’ to save us from being sold into slavery by his kinsman. This ignorance may have had something to do with the fact that I worked almost entirely at the House of Commons and rarely visited ...”

“... the fatal precision of the physical sciences. This second period draws to a close with the fall of John Law and the great financial collapses in Paris, London and the Dutch cities in 1720-1. On 29 August 1728, Montesquieu visits the Scots financier in Venice and, on the evidence of the shorthand notes in the posthumously published Voyages, does not understand ...”

“... no prejudiced, loutish ultra-conservatives north of the Mason-Dixon line (and certainly none in Washington). But the caricatures are affected, too. In Power and Powerlessness, his 1980 study of quiescence and rebellion among Appalachian ‘mountaineers’, John Gaventa noted that where ‘a positive self-image is not ...”

“... in this new selection of his television criticism to Walter Pater, Keats, Saul Bellow and John Donne – consorting with boisterous jokes about the crushed budgerigars composing J.R.’s hatband. James goes as far as it is possible to go towards miscegenating Shakespeare, T.S. Eliot, and The John Curry ...”

“... of the Bible Belt, a movement whose votes every Republican president since Reagan has depended on. John McCain is the party’s first presidential candidate in forty years who hasn’t secured the evangelical vote. H.L. Hunt, according to one of his enemies, ‘would be the most dangerous man in America if he wasn’t such a damn hick’. Hick or not, he was ...”

“... and Japan combined. Yet in political terms such magnitudes continue to be virtual reality. Beside Washington or Tokyo, Brussels remains a cipher. The Union is not equivalent to either the United States or Japan, since it is not a sovereign state. But what kind of formation is it? Most Europeans themselves are at a loss for an answer. The Union remains a more ...”

“... the Beat scene and later became a boozy guru to the hippies. In 1967, during an anti-war march in Washington, he advised Ed Sanders and Allen Ginsberg on their ambitious scheme to exorcise the Pentagon. If they really hoped to levitate the building – and they did – Smith suggested they would need a live cow, painted with magical symbols. It was a long ...”

“... war’ endured by Mozambique was orchestrated and financed by South Africa. Pretoria and Washington bear most of the blame for the 20-year conflict in Angola. But the holocaust in Portuguese East Timor, half a small island off the northern coast of Australia, was the doing of the Indonesian dictatorship of former general Suharto – with crucial ...”

“... At around 3.30 a.m. on Wednesday, 4 November 2020 (which was 10.30 p.m. on Tuesday, 3 November in Washington DC) it looked as if it was happening a third time. Trump was going to win Florida, despite the millions of dollars spent there by Michael Bloomberg, and he was storming ahead of his 2016 numbers in Ohio. The other swing states were closer, but they ...”

“... possible. Shockley worked out first the theory of semiconduction, and then set his colleagues John Bardeen and Walter Brattain to work on a practical device to manipulate electrical current on a semiconductor. On 23 December 1947 they demonstrated the first working transistor. That invention won the three men the Nobel Prize for physics in 1956.Shockley ...”

“... prosecution, never existed. The four men, three arms-dealers called Michael Aspin, Eric Matson and John Taylor and a Lloyds underwriter called William Harper, were tried at the Old Bailey in early 1988. Aspin, Harper and Matson were found guilty and sent to prison – Aspin is still inside. Taylor was acquitted. Aspin, who was cast as the ringleader, pleaded ...”

“... spring to mind) may wish to consider why the Jamahiriyya, despite mending its fences with Washington and London in 2003-4 and dealing reasonably with Paris and Rome, should have proved so vulnerable to their sudden hostility. And the Libyan war should also prompt us to examine what the actions of the Western powers in relation to Africa and Asia, and ...”

“... the process. It also reflects the strikingly ‘novelistic’ character of many of their lives. John Barrell has observed acutely (in the LRB of 2 November 2000) that so-called literary biography seems now to have become markedly less ‘literary’, subordinating or virtually ignoring the work of the writer concerned, except insofar as it can be made to ...”