“... its will on an uneasy and reluctant political hierarchy. In an interview with my co-author Desmond Rice and myself after the publication of our book The Sinking of the ‘Belgrano’ last year, he gave this account: We just about got the War Cabinet to agree that we should repossess South on the way down. These [the Ministers] thought that would get bogged ...”

“... The Israeli journalist Alex Fishman described the ‘revolutionary ideas’ of Cheney, Rice and Rumsfeld (who also refers to the ‘so-called occupied territories’) as terrifyingly hawkish. Sharon has said that ‘next to our American friends’ Effi Eitam – one of the Israeli Cabinet’s most remorseless hardliners – is a ‘total ...”

“... about ‘kissing the asses’ of congressmen. Then others entered the Oval Office, Condoleezza Rice among them. There was a conversation about Iraq. As the meeting drew to a close, Garner said to Bush: ‘The one thing I’ll tell you, I’ve had three weeks to work with Ambassador Bremer and he’s one of the hardest working men I’ve ever seen. He’s a ...”

“... everything from dactyls to death, geography spans everything from sand dunes to marriage rituals. David Harvey, the doyen of radical geographers, writes of material limits in a language which disdains all bounds, crossing from Spinoza to scallop fishing, the architecture of Baltimore to the circulation of capital. Justice, Nature and the Geography of ...”

“... banned groups advocating for an Islamic caliphate in the country.In his new book, Revolusi, David Van Reybrouck puts the creation of the republic at the centre of the story. Indonesia was the first country to declare independence in the wake of the Second World War, shortly after the surrender of Japan, which had occupied what was then known as the ...”

“... After the attacks of 11 September 2001, Cheney assembled a crack team of White House lawyers, David Addington, Timothy Flanigan and Alberto Gonzales, with support from John Yoo at the Justice Department, who set about granting the president as many extraordinary powers as Cheney thought he needed. First up was intercepting, without a ...”

“... to reconstitute its weapons of mass destruction programmes.’ In July 2001, I heard Condoleezza Rice say: ‘We are able to keep his arms from him. His military forces have not been rebuilt.’ On 11 September 2001, six hours after the attacks, I heard that Donald Rumsfeld said that it might be an opportunity to ‘hit’ Iraq. I heard that he said: ‘Go ...”

“... it usually does, your family will hold a raffle, gathering donations of coconuts, taro, bananas, rice, chickens and maybe a pig, selling tickets at 25 cents each. The winner gets the whole lot, Joseph told me, making the shape of a large pile with his hands.There are more than 100,000 Micronesian citizens, but less than two-thirds of them live in Micronesia ...”

“... with high-tech entrepreneurs. The crucial figure in this project was Jared Cohen, a Condoleezza Rice protégé who served as a senior adviser in both the Rice and Clinton State Departments. Cohen’s chief achievement was to promote the power of social media in the Iranian elections of June 2009. Cohen privately ...”

“... can hit hard with words when the president wishes not to be seen to strike. Obama’s confidant David Axelrod, who managed his campaign and is often summoned to speak to the press on his behalf, emits a pleasant porridge of upper-media demotic. Another close adviser, Valerie Jarrett, a Chicago friend, is a technocrat to the bone, genially officious but ...”

“... David Mitchell’s new novel is set on and around an artificial island called Dejima, constructed in the bay of Nagasaki to house representatives of the Vereenigde Oest-Indische Compagnie (Dutch East India Company), the sole official conduit for European trade with Japan during almost all of the rule of the Tokugawa Shoguns (1603-1867 ...”

“... Lloyd George became a hapless victim of technological advance in the Twenties. While, like Archie Rice, he was still having a go on the public stage, Stanley Baldwin stole into the sitting-room of anyone lucky enough to have a new wireless. His avoidance of histrionics in favour of the fireside manner was pitched perfectly for his middle-brow, middle-class ...”

“... for contemporary architecture (Rogers and Piano were assisted by the great engineer Peter Rice, who often consulted for RRP thereafter). Second, it offered one response to the open question of what post-industrial design might look like (‘most of us want it to look like something,’ Reyner Banham once remarked; ‘we don’t want form to follow ...”

“... Nowhere does he acknowledge this. He even writes with some pride of the resolution he and David Davis proposed, and which the House of Commons carried, criticising the ruling by the European Court of Human Rights which held that depriving prisoners of the vote was a denial of their human rights. Straw stood to gain nothing politically from this ...”

“... in their driveways.’ Their wives ‘had recipes for coconut cake; they had chicken soup with rice for the littlest children, home with sore throats; they had orders in for new dinette sets with laminated table tops that looked like real wood yet were easily sponged off after a meal.’ Hoffman is more affectionate, less savagely amused than Sprott in her ...”