“... and 60 bullets and if they come for me I am going to open fire.’ It is strange to hear George Bush and John Reid deny that a civil war is going on, given that so many bodies – all strangled, shot or hanged solely because of their religious allegiance – are being discovered every day. Car bombs exploded in the markets in the great Shia slum ...”

“... in Chicago – and have come back to Clarksdale to escape the racism in the north for the ‘devil we know’. They decide to open a juke joint, and buy a derelict mill from the town’s closeted KKK leader, Hogwood (David Maldonado). The twins enlist their cousin Sammie (Miles Caton), a sharecropper and precociously talented preacher’s boy who sings and ...”

“... banners, slogans, posters, cards, photographs of deformed babies, cartoons of Blair, Brown and Bush, the parliamentary voting records of MPs, grubby teddy bears and toys (as well as the plastic sheets and cans that constituted Haw’s accommodation). They acted under Section 132 of the Serious Organised Crime and Police Act: a rather heavy legal vehicle ...”

“... The whole continent is written off as a place where good things can happen – a place where, in George W. Bush’s memorable phrase, ‘wings take dream’. It is left to rot. Welcome to the world of post-modern politics. This scenario (or something like it) is laid out by Philip Bobbitt in the course of describing three ...”

“... a big vote-winner with the folks back home in Kansas. That is one reason why, as long ago as 1962, W.H. Auden said: ‘When I find myself in the company of scientists, I feel like a shabby curate who has strayed by mistake into a drawing room full of dukes.’ By these and other measures, the American love affair with science has become even more ardent over ...”

“... to Martin Luther King – a place to stand against recent orthodoxies from Kennedy to Reagan and Bush. Impatient with easy liberal scapegoating of religious faith, Wills rescues a politics of religious commitment from the clutches of right-to-life fanaticism and a sacralised US mission. For Bercovitch, however, religion is the original sin. The Puritan shift ...”

“... impossible to imagine Altamont or Live Aid, Michael Jackson on the Thames, Bono cold calling George Bush mid-gig, Katy Perry in orbit. No personal touchscreen beckoning itchy fingers. Just gazing dreamily into the distance or cycling about aimlessly on long summer afternoons. Boredom and its cloud-drift antidotes. Boredom as something almost ...”

“... The refuse is the unexploded US ordnance which litters the countryside. Through Page’s eyes we see the beauty of Vietnam as well as the horror and the excitement of the war that held so many bao chi – the Vietnamese for ‘reporter’ – with an often blinding fascination. ‘The war days had been the ultimate in experience.’ Page dreamily ...”

“... they are entitled not to be summarily executed or tortured or held indefinitely without trial. The Bush administration after 9/11 set out to change all that. With the designation of unlawful combatant it created a self-sustaining doctrine that there are individuals who, having attacked the US or opposed it by force, have forfeited all rights both as combatants ...”

“... Knesset who had fought in the Warsaw Ghetto, made a direct appeal to Begin: ‘Return to reality. We are not in the Warsaw Ghetto, we are in the State of Israel.’ Amos Oz, who saw the invasion of Lebanon as ‘a typical Jabotinskyian fantasy’, wrote that ‘the urge to revive Hitler, only to kill him again and again, is ...”

“... the term coined by the political scientist Timothy Mitchell to explain his thesis that what we know as modern mass democracy was made possible by cheap, plentiful oil. But equally vital in the 1970s was ‘carbon solidarity’, the idea that weaker nations might use oil as leverage against the strong.A year earlier​ , in 1974, the UN General Assembly ...”

“... that Israel is still the only state in the world with no officially declared borders. And when we look at that 50-60 per cent in terms of the former Palestine, it amounts to about 12 per cent of the land from which the Palestinians were driven in 1948. The Israelis talk of ‘conceding’ these territories. But they were taken by conquest and, in a strict ...”

“... I’m huffy about that; I wish I had his royalties. Royalties aside, what have they got that we haven’t? It’s not the texture of their prose I shouldn’t think, since most of us write better than most of them. (I don’t include Kierkegaard. He was a master and way out of the league that the rest of us play in.) Similarly, though many of the ...”

“... Shortly before the invasion of Iraq, George Bush’s economic adviser, Larry Lindsey, estimated that the war would cost $200 billion. ‘Baloney,’ Donald Rumsfeld fumed, offering a figure of $50-60 billion, some of which he said would be supplied by America’s friends. Andrew Natsios, the head of the Agency for International Development, told Ted Koppel on Nightline that postwar Iraq could be rebuilt for $1 ...”

“... Guard along the length of the frontier. The bill is sponsored by John McCain (Arizona), who, like George W. Bush, was once an immigration liberal but sees where the votes have come to lie in recent years. Two highly visible protagonists in the immigration drama, Salvador Reza and the Republican state senator, Russell ...”