“... Reagan reluctantly called it quits. He returned to the path of pragmatic conservatism with Anthony Kennedy, who passed through the Democratic Senate without resistance. Wishing to avoid another decisive neo-con defeat, George H.W. Bush developed the art of the stealth candidate. The search was on for neo-cons whose public statements and writings were so ...”

“... can hit hard with words when the president wishes not to be seen to strike. Obama’s confidant David Axelrod, who managed his campaign and is often summoned to speak to the press on his behalf, emits a pleasant porridge of upper-media demotic. Another close adviser, Valerie Jarrett, a Chicago friend, is a technocrat to the bone, genially officious but ...”

“... and they do keep cropping up. I think there’s more than a little Pynchon floating around John Kennedy Toole, whose A Confederacy of Dunces is a book nearly as bloated as its protagonist; Don DeLillo’s social, um, satires owe more than a little to Pynchon’s work; and in a recent essay in Harper’s magazine the young novelist Jonathan Franzen declares ...”

“... unreliable ghosted memoir of her own and a reminiscence by the founder of her British fan club, David Nathan, and its secretary, Sylvia Hampton. Potential biographers might have been put off by the resistance of Simone’s daughter, who doesn’t want to talk about her mother, and many former friends and colleagues who refused to be interviewed or give ...”

“... statement that ‘violence will come home to roost’ is a knowing citation of Malcolm X on the Kennedy assassination or just a coincidence of idiom, but the symmetry of the current ruling political rhetoric of the United States with the language of messianic Zionism as here described is hard to overlook, and Rose herself has touched on it. The existence of ...”

“... the examples our lawmakers bear in mind when they frame a policy of response in the days to come. David Bromwich New Haven The news from the Middle East is not all bad. The savagery of the attacks on 11 September has, in at least one country, brought Muslim militancy into disrepute and swelled the ranks of the moderates. At the main public prayers in Tehran ...”

“... quotations from our national leaders are no longer the inspirational homilies of a Roosevelt or a Kennedy – ‘You have nothing to fear, but fear itself’ or ‘Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country’ – but the exposed whoppers of Richard ‘I am not a crook’ Nixon, George ‘Read my lips: no new ...”

“... in. Just to get you in the mood, here’s his account of what he and Andy did on the day John Kennedy was shot. We heard Walter Cronkite say ‘President Kennedy died at 2 p.m. on November 22nd, 1963.’ We started hugging each other, pressing our bodies together and trembling. I started crying and Andy started ...”

“... Crisis stands alone in Humanity, as a salutary lesson in the vision thing. Glover knows, as did Kennedy, that the inconvenient fact that US missiles were already primed in the Soviet Union’s backyard in Turkey might invest the Cuban silos with a certain fearful symmetry. Glover fails to consider that there was a psycho edging the globe towards the ...”

“... US-backed Kurdistan would be a ‘bulwark against the Soviet Union’. Barzani threatened that if Kennedy refused to help him, he would turn to Moscow instead. (This handy threat – the poor nation’s weapon of choice – has had multiple applications since, most recently in the PYD’s intimation earlier this year that it would appeal to Russia for help if ...”

“... the case that Walsh enjoys the services of one of the more established literary agents in London, David Higham Associates. The publicity studiously does not mention that Walsh has written other books. The implication is that Knowledge of Angels is a work like Joan Brady’s A Theory of War, which came from nowhere in 1993 to win the Whitbread Prize ...”

“... In the extracts from David Stockman’s memoirs published on Monday 14 April by Newsweek, Reagan’s former Budget Director spoke of the mediocrities, charlatans and power-hungry politicos who cluster around the disturbingly vague and incompetent Great Communicator. For them, Stockman said, ‘reality-time’ was the seven o’clock evening news on television ...”

“... on the US being willing to sacrifice, say, Chicago for Birmingham. The belief was borne out by Kennedy’s decision during the Cuban Missile Crisis to modify the US/Nato nuclear command and control system: he insisted that should the US attack Cuba and the Soviets retaliate with nuclear strikes on Europe, the US could not retaliate in turn without ...”

“... politics, then? Not exactly. ‘He was his party’s most fertile ideas man at Westminster since David Lloyd George, perhaps since Gladstone,’ Barberis blurts out in his final section, almost as though he has just thought of it, reassuring himself by adding: ‘That is what he was – an ideas man, not a political philosopher or even the careful crafter of ...”

“... Ghanaians, Communist Party etc.’ There wasn’t much truth in these claims. ‘At its height,’ David Gibbs writes in The Political Economy of Third World Intervention (1991), ‘the communist intervention in the Congo comprised no more than 380 Soviets and Czechoslovaks – against 14,000 UN troops and many thousands of Belgian military ...”