“... his mouth’ is unfortunately an incorrect translation of Hoffstetter’s original German. Jasper Ridley, Garibaldi Some twenty years ago the idea (come from England, no doubt) that cigars, like Loos’s blondes, were for gentlemen only, was dispelled by the scraggly mien of Fidel Castro and Che Guevara’s handsome head, both clad in US Army surplus ...”

“... To most people, those last years fashion yet another More. Which More shall we choose? Jasper Ridley’s is yet another: not merely a fanatic, but the sort of sneaking, unmanly fellow who uses two pseudonyms for the same book against Luther. (For that matter he also pretended that his Dialogue of Comfort had been written by a Hungarian in ...”

“... short stories, most of them in SF magazines. By dying in March, Dick missed the May premiere of Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner, the first movie made from his work. Twenty-six years on, eight more films have come out of Dick’s fiction, among them the Arnold Schwarzenegger vehicle Total Recall (1990) and Steven Spielberg’s Minority Report (2002). Vintage ...”

“... end of war.’ So said Plato, at least according to General MacArthur, the Imperial War Museum and Ridley Scott’s Black Hawk Down. It’s not clear that Plato did say this, but regardless of the statement’s provenance, its constant iteration throughout the 20th century suggests a notion we still hold dear: war is life, peace is death. Exactly why the ...”