“... presented, Blood for Oil misdescribes what a single commodity – despite oil’s unique political weight – can actually represent in relation to larger structural imperatives. This is not the same as saying that the Blood for Oil argument is crudely reductive. It is true that there are almost too many other plausible ways of framing the Iraq invasion: as an ...”

“... can bring power to the office by their own efforts. Johnson tried in the early days, throwing his weight around in the Democratic caucus in the Senate as though nothing had changed. He was politely, and then less politely, ignored. He discovered he had no personal weapons to threaten anyone with; all he had was the authority of the president. Kennedy, having ...”

“... to spring a trap in our minds. ‘Rural England is where urban England now dumps its rubbish,’ Richard Girling writes. ‘Here it tips everything from garbage in landfills to fridges in ponds, broken cars and surplus people.’1 The Daily Mail says there is a plague of rats in Britain as a result of the lack of care taken in refuse collection. The ...”

“... its time, the book has had its admirers – my battered 1970s paperback carries endorsements from Richard Hughes, Naomi Mitchison and C.S. Lewis, and Auden was an early fan. (Auden was a patron saint of lost causes. He was also the only major writer to stand up for Laura Riding.) But mostly, the sort of people who get their opinions published have lashed it ...”

“... the throb of what sounds like the engine of a large ship, and the menacing rumble of an enormous weight rolling over the rails grows louder. Only when you start to think you’re on the wrong platform does a great yellow beak loom in from around the bend and the locomotive make its roaring entrance, seeming to squeeze through a space both too narrow and too ...”

“... in London that summer, almost all the New York Pop artists were there, but not Warhol. In 1965, Richard Avedon guest-edited an issue of Harper’s Bazaar that included work by Rauschenberg, Johns, Lichtenstein and Oldenburg, but again not Warhol.None of this spoiled the party at his first museum survey show, at the Institute of Contemporary Art in ...”

“... the right-wing think tank Policy Exchange, whose funding sources are a jealously guarded secret, Richard Walton, the retired head of counter-terrorism at the Metropolitan Police, accused XR of trying to break up ‘democracy and the British state’. In January, City of London police put XR on a list of groups said to have extremist ideologies; they were ...”

“... nor pain,’ he wrote, ‘ever makes me forget the inexorable gravity of the situation and the weight of my responsibility. Every anti-Fascist German writer must exert his whole strength today to the very utmost, and I know that, for particular reasons, I am under an especially great obligation.’ He decided to publish, from Amsterdam, a monthly literary ...”

“... that never happened. Stevenson had a copy of a book by Dr Horace Benge Dobell, On Loss of Weight, Blood-Spitting and Lung Disease. Dobell had been a consulting physician at the Royal Hospital for Diseases of the Chest. ‘I have not often derived more pleasure and instruction from a book,’ Stevenson wrote to him, confessing that he felt ‘but a ...”

“... whose lectures he attended; gripped by the engagé theatre of Sartre and Camus, and the novels of Richard Wright and Chester Himes. He was also reading Jaspers, Nietzsche, Hegel, Bergson, Bachelard and Lacan – the ‘logician of madness’, he called him, partly in jest. He dreaded the ‘larval, stocky, obsolete life that awaits me once I’ve finished my ...”

“... had been dead for fourteen years the remark may well have been clumsily concocted to lend weight to the journalist’s own opinion about the postwar period. Two works of notably queer provenance which premiered at Covent Garden, Benjamin Britten’s Billy Budd (1951), the libretto co-written by Forster, and more particularly his ill-received ...”

“... I hate to say it, but it can be very helpful to us. I mean you hear a singer even as brilliant as Richard Tucker and he’s a Jew. HALDEMAN: Is he? NIXON: He’s pushy … HALDEMAN: There are a lot more anti-Semites than there are Jews, and the anti-Semites are with us generally and the Jews sure aren’t. The Breast was a grotesque fable out of Kafka ...”

“... a TV crew reassured us that we were still in the real world. The tall, London-based CNN presenter Richard Quest, in tailored trenchcoat, waited impressively for his gear. CNN was here for some really significant story – the marriage of Sir Paul McCartney and anti-landmine campaigner Heather Mills, perhaps; a shade less probably, the wedding in St Eugene’s ...”

“... among the Soviet republics, the RSFSR had no party or academy of its own, yet its demographic weight ensured Russian dominance of the union as a whole, in a hierarchy that was always unequal. In the 1930s, script and teaching in sister republics were Russified; yet at the same time, local languages were fostered, and a panoply of institutions created ...”

“... Kremlin Rising, that puts the palliators of the Financial Times to shame.2 Among historians, Richard Pipes, at one with Malia in hostility to Communism, but in temperament and outlook the all but complete opposite, has struck a characteristically dissonant note. Whereas Malia believed it was essentially the First World War that blew Russia off course ...”