“... the CIA’s crimes are only part of the story. Torture was also practised by the US military after Donald Rumsfeld signed a memorandum on 22 December 2002 authorising ‘counter resistance techniques’. Rumsfeld personally signed off on Slahi’s ‘special interrogation plan’ at Guantánamo. It began with solitary confinement in a zone called India ...”

“... his lot had he been listed merely as ‘art historian’ and not also as ‘a communist spy’. (Donald MacLean, we note, gets less space but is made to sound a little more respectable: his profession is described as ‘Soviet spy’.) As it turns out, Blunt’s biographer so admires the art historian that he wishes to deal kindly with the spy. Thus much of ...”

“... living. His few brushes with seriousness came when Orson Welles cast him in a production of Moby Dick, when he played the Dauphin in St Joan, and when he appeared in Shaffer’s The Public Eye; he sustained close friendships with Robert Bolt and the German scholar Erich Heller, and was never happier than when alone in his flat listening to Brahms and Fauré ...”

“... the hard-boiled newsman responsible for the harsh dynamism of the long-running detective strip Dick Tracy, is one. George Herriman, inventor of the sweet, enigmatic Krazy Kat, a strip that refined a single situation for more than thirty years, is another. And then there is Robert Crumb, better known as R. Crumb, the originator of so-called ‘underground ...”

“... in August 1956, just as the Suez Crisis was brewing. Ever since the defection of Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean five years earlier, he’d been living in something of a twilight zone. Intercepts of Soviet communications decrypted by the Venona Project had pointed to there being a ‘third man’ inside British intelligence who had helped Burgess and Maclean ...”

“... Donald Trump’s​ strategy for succeeding in the November mid-term elections consisted almost entirely of an effort to foment immigration panic. After it failed and he lost his Republican congressional majority he made a feint at appeasing the Democrats, with a deal to keep government running, then threatened to invoke emergency powers to build the wall his right-wing base demands, and at last offered a hint of moderate conciliation ...”

“... have rarely presented a more disheartening spectacle. The repellent and dangerous antics of Donald Trump are troubling enough, but so is the Democratic Party leadership’s failure to take in the significance of the 2016 election campaign. Bernie Sanders’s challenge to Hillary Clinton, combined with Trump’s triumph, revealed the breadth of popular ...”

“... more or less a given. So did the proposition that we were living in a world imagined by Philip K. Dick; this was easily recognisable even if you’d barely read him. To those who knew his work well, the morning-after debate consisted of whether Trump was more like Buster Friendly, the fascist demagogue television personality from Do Androids Dream of Electric ...”

“... a bit like an Americanised nouveau roman and puts Baker somewhere on a line of descent between Donald Barthelme, with whom he briefly studied, and David Foster Wallace. Yet Howie isn’t void-struck or an object of satire. Like Mike, the narrator of Baker’s second novel, Room Temperature (1990), he just wants to get things ‘correctly situated in the ...”

“... the neoconservative Democrats who moved over to join the Reagan administration was Paul Wolfowitz, Donald Rumsfeld’s deputy at the Pentagon. According to Mann’s collective biography of the ‘Vulcans’, the key decision-makers in the new Republican defence establishment, Wolfowitz ‘got out just in time’, resigning from the Carter administration only ...”

“... with what amounted to pocket money. (He did better in this respect than the feeble-minded Mr Dick of David Copperfield, who is supplied with pocket money but not allowed to spend it.) Not long after becoming third earl, he fled from home for a brief period in the company of his Swiss valet, though whether this was an abduction or an elopement is hard to ...”

“... new biography, enter his trance, and suddenly transform himself uninhibitedly into Mickey or Donald or an owl or an old hunting dog . . . ‘He would imitate the expressions of the dog, and look from one side to the other, and raise first one brow and then the other’ . . . ‘You’d have the feeling of the whole thing,’ ...”

“... event’ in the history of Halliburton, whose former CEO, who still retains stock options, is Dick Cheney. Klein is outraged by the rapacity of corporations that see ‘exciting market opportunities’, rather than human suffering, in wars, hurricanes, epidemics and other disasters. She draws an extended analogy between Sri Lanka after the tsunami and New ...”

“... reliability by the CIA and other agencies, a process known as ‘stovepiping’. This means that Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz judge the veracity of reports from the field themselves (or with their staffers) without the information having first been ‘subjected to rigorous scrutiny’, and then rush the ...”

“... waterboarded, and on what was gained, would help the US electorate evaluate the promises made by Donald Trump and other Republican candidates to bring waterboarding back. Hayden’s failure even to mention these discrepancies undermines his insistence that the intelligence community can help the public make informed decisions. The different demands of the ...”