“... 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 ...”

“... In the movie, however, it provides the occasion for one of Hollywood’s happy endings, in which John Quincy Adams moves the Supreme Court to a recognition of human rights by eloquently invoking the Declaration of Independence. Unfortunately, this never happened. The justices did, indeed, send the Africans home, but their decision turned on maritime law and ...”

“... to critique Neorealist movies. Enrico Pasquali’s images of the bare-legged female mondine (rice workers) of the Po Valley having their lunch in the fields demystify the glamorous icon established by Silvana Mangano in De Santis’s hit Bitter Rice (1949).The fortnightly publication Cinema Nuovo was established in ...”

“... have been one of the most moral women of that particular, frenzied decade’. Her friend Mandy Rice-Davies was the ‘true tart’: ‘There was always shock on her face whenever she thought she might have to do more than lie on her back to make a living.’ Visiting the Twenty-One Room, ‘a glorified knocking shop with overpriced drinks and rooms to rent ...”

“... described, as early as 1720, as ‘flooded, unhealthy, impracticable; fit for nothing save growing rice’? It is the crucial question about New Orleans, considered by every historian of the region. The conclusion most often reached is a variation on the observation made in 1876 by the German geographer Friedrich Ratzel: ‘New Orleans is just as poorly ...”

“... voters in 1945; or a better comparison might be with the United States in 1960, when the dazzling John F. Kennedy seemed to represent the beginning of a new age after what his supporters saw as the suffocating and mediocre years of President Eisenhower. The under-forties in particular, in Australia in 1972 as in the United States in 1960, suddenly felt ...”

“... boiling you skewered a piece of meat and immersed it until it was cooked, transferred it to your rice bowl and ate it. Then, when everyone had consumed all their meat, the liquor was served as a soup in the now empty rice-bowls.Unless the dinner were a very special affair, and sometimes even then, William would retire from ...”

“... onwards knew, even as they escalated the war, that Vietnam was a doomed cause. As early as 1964 John McNaughton, a Pentagon official, had written a memo that US objectives in Indochina were ‘70 per cent avoid a humiliating defeat … 20 per cent to keep South Vietnam (and the adjacent territory) from Chinese hands – 10 per cent to permit the people of ...”

“... it helps the would-be novelist to know from the inside, as it were, what his people are up to. As John Francis more elegantly puts it in his Introduction, ‘you feel Pym knew more about her characters than is necessary for us to know, but that these reserves are expended only if essential for her art.’ As Johnson observed to Boswell, you cannot know a ...”

“... it did not conform with an otherwise cheerful tone. Within a week in January I heard Condoleezza Rice say there were 120,000 Iraqi troops trained to take over the security of the country; I heard Senator Joseph Biden, Democrat from Delaware, say that the number was closer to 4000; I heard Donald Rumsfeld say: ‘The fact of the matter is that there are ...”

“... in the face of hostile climates and scant diets; to eastern Asia, where the taming of wild rice gave the world its major food crop; finally back to Africa, from which the human species had originally emerged before its relentless and unparalleled march around the globe. To compile his narrative, he has trawled through a huge amount of literature. The ...”

“... 1933, in Atlanta, Georgia. He was evidendy brought up in the South-West, and graduated BA from Rice in 1955. He spent the year 1955-6 at Caltech, as a graduate student in physics. This was the period when the recently formed John Birch Society was active in San Marino, a mile or two away from the Caltech campus. Pierce ...”

“... of boiled cabbage and old rag mats,’ Victory Gin ‘gave off a sickly, oily smell, as of Chinese rice spirit’). There are other isolated moments of odour in the narrative, such as Winston’s orgasmic whiff of real coffee and Parsons’s diarrhoea in the Ministry of Love. But for all Orwell’s obsession with bad smells, 1984 is relatively thin on the ...”

“... 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 warrant, communications to and from the United States (an action forbidden under federal law ...”

“... was found there the next day. After the suicide, Alison’s relationship with her schoolboy son John became closer and then too close: ‘one’, Denis Judd says, ‘of extraordinary, clinging love’. She interfered with his first engagement, and when he eventually married she fell foul (how could she help it?) of his wife, who believed that ‘...”