“... where he seems to have majored in film studies. When the novel opens, in January 2009, with Barack Obama and ‘his exceptional wife’ about to enter the White House, he is in his mid-twenties and in search of a subject for a screenplay he plans to write. René’s subject presents itself on the opening page. In the course of ...”

“... of the same person. Was it that they accompanied their announcement with real-seeming video of Barack Obama, as president, appearing to speak words he’d actually spoken decades earlier? Or that the work was funded by Google, Facebook, Samsung and Intel? This year another set of scientists devised software, part-funded by Adobe, that allowed them to ...”

“... in America, a billionaire, a hero to tens of millions of people, maybe the prime example, before Obama was Obama, of what strides a black person might have made since Civil Rights. A thousand tiny deceits could flutter around Oprah, or escape like a colony of bats from some subterranean cave, but they would not alter her ...”

“... mission in Afghanistan may be over, our commitment to Afghanistan and its people endures.President Barack Obama, 15 October 2015When [Afghans] leave, they break the social contract. This is an existential choice. Countries do not survive with their best attempting to flee. So I have no sympathy.President Ashraf Ghani, 31 March 2016He reads books on the ...”

“... preference for military solutions – stands in sharp contrast to the caution and indecision of Barack Obama. Putin is also, in Israeli eyes, refreshingly indifferent to human rights. As relations with the Obama administration have cooled – particularly in the aftermath of the Iran nuclear deal, which Netanyahu did ...”

“... devout congregation, with no call and response, ‘not even a stray “amen”’. Where for Barack Obama the sound of a gospel choir from the back row of Harlem’s Abyssinian Baptist Church was a ‘fleeting glimpse of that thing which I sought’, she’ll have nothing to do with ‘whooping and hollering’. She has never known a crisis of ...”

“... exploitation of its oil resources. The three principal Democratic candidates – Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and John Edwards – have already hedged their bets, refusing to promise that, if elected, they would remove American forces from Iraq before 2013, the end of their first term. Among the winners: oil-services companies like Halliburton; the oil ...”

“... and, above all, in the index, which, for instance, suggests discreetly that both John McCain and Barack Obama indulged in adulterous liaisons with Lupe Vélez, the most fiery of Johnny Weissmuller’s five wives. The conceit is that the index was compiled before the lawyers looked at the manuscript, and remains unrevised after their ravages. So although ...”

“... realised it had to compete with China for Jakarta’s loyalty. Battle was joined, in November, by Barack Obama, who made a triumphant ‘return’ to Jakarta, reminiscing about growing up there and delivering a speech at the national university that was cheered as though he were a revivalist preacher. The chaos of the late 1990s and early 2000s was ...”

“... dusk. He loved that he had more Twitter followers than almost anyone else, though it galled that Barack Obama and Justin Bieber had more. While other celebrity social media accounts were often so sanitised that they smelled of chlorine – ‘Happy Tuesday everybody! Stay positive!’ – at least no one could claim that @elonmusk had ever been ...”

“... American radio hosts like Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck use it to deny the legitimacy of Barack Obama. (Beck, as it happens, is the author of Glenn Beck’s Common Sense: The Case against an Out-of-Control Government, Inspired by Thomas Paine.) Is there no way to rescue common sense from the likes of Beck, and restore something of its democratic ...”

“... a company making its tax payment not to an account controlled by the IRS but to … Barack Obama.’ Maass also makes good use of US court records, although in the case of James Giffen, the middleman who helped Chevron win contracts in Kazakhstan and was indicted for kicking back $80 million to President Nazarbayev and other officials, the ...”

“... a symbol of white supremacy which, since Trump came to power, determined to undo everything that Barack Obama achieved, has become increasingly conspicuous, and not just in the South. For Black Americans, the spectacle of violent Confederate nostalgists in the Capitol building is less likely to recall Japanese fighter planes than the campaign of racist ...”

“... consumers from buying pangolin scale tincture, tiger glue and hornbill bangles.In July 2013, Barack Obama issued an executive order describing wildlife trafficking as an illicit enterprise worth billions of dollars which fuelled instability and undermined security. It transformed the role of the US Fish and Wildlife Service. ‘The State ...”

“... the case that the Democrats were less keen on running Eric for higher office, at least right away. Obama spent seven years in the Illinois state senate before going to the US Senate – that’s how it usually works. The Democratic Party was drowning in ambitious Rhodes Scholars who wanted to work for Obama, or to be ...”