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“... PM is reincarnated here as the great black whale of a singer, ‘La’ Estrella, a warbling Moby Dick or, to allow this review to become infected by Cabrera’s advanced pun-ophilia, Moby Pussy. And there is a third reason. When this novel, under the title Vista del Amanecer en le Tropica (Vision of Dawn in the Tropics), was awarded the Biblioteca Breve ...”

“... for America if people learn the truth? The US national security state is the lengthened shadow of Dick Cheney. He made himself a master of the levers of government when he was secretary of defence under George H.W. Bush. His sense of rightful authority will have been confirmed by his regular participation in the continuity-of-government exercises: a yearly ...”

“... human rights tsar, said a year after Holbrooke’s death. And indeed he hasn’t. In the wake of Donald Trump’s ascendancy, praise of Holbrooke reached fever pitch among members of the ‘resistance’. Yet this desperation to keep his reputation warm may indicate the American liberal elite’s waning capacity for mythmaking rather than the resuscitation ...”

“... to acts performed by them pursuant to the terms and conditions of a contract’. By the time Donald Rumsfeld was sacked as US defense secretary, there were around 100,000 private contractors working for the US government in Iraq, more than ten times the number in the 1991 Gulf War. Although fewer than a third are in the security business, various US ...”

“... detachment. The Bush administration extended the invitation to dissociate. ‘Stuff happens,’ Donald Rumsfeld said with psychopathic cheer in response to chaotic scenes of destruction in occupied Iraq; ‘Now watch this drive,’ Bush said, returning to his golf swing after delivering a sober message about the need to resist terrorism. After a brief ...”

“... his lot had he been listed merely as ‘art historian’ and not also as ‘a communist spy’. (Donald MacLean, we note, gets less space but is made to sound a little more respectable: his profession is described as ‘Soviet spy’.) As it turns out, Blunt’s biographer so admires the art historian that he wishes to deal kindly with the spy. Thus much of ...”

“... living. His few brushes with seriousness came when Orson Welles cast him in a production of Moby Dick, when he played the Dauphin in St Joan, and when he appeared in Shaffer’s The Public Eye; he sustained close friendships with Robert Bolt and the German scholar Erich Heller, and was never happier than when alone in his flat listening to Brahms and Fauré ...”

“... the CIA’s crimes are only part of the story. Torture was also practised by the US military after Donald Rumsfeld signed a memorandum on 22 December 2002 authorising ‘counter resistance techniques’. Rumsfeld personally signed off on Slahi’s ‘special interrogation plan’ at Guantánamo. It began with solitary confinement in a zone called India ...”

“... more or less a given. So did the proposition that we were living in a world imagined by Philip K. Dick; this was easily recognisable even if you’d barely read him. To those who knew his work well, the morning-after debate consisted of whether Trump was more like Buster Friendly, the fascist demagogue television personality from Do Androids Dream of Electric ...”

“... an Arab in Tripoli or thwart the machinations of Baron Stockmar in the Sudan (‘It’s the game, Dick: The Great Game. The only game in the world worth playing’). The rot set in with that lacklustre fellow Ashenden. His adventures, while accurate in detail, reflected Somerset Maugham’s own failure in organising a network. The spy-master has been degraded ...”

“... wars, of which this is the third volume.* Woodward is not only granted audiences: he interviews Donald Rumsfeld, and others, at his home, in his own kitchen, over supper. If you’re Nigella-ish, you’ll be disappointed by his non-disclosure of what there was to eat.This hasn’t always been so. Woodward’s first Watergate article wasn’t about the ...”

“... of the men who did most to fashion Bush’s thinking. Paul Wolfowitz is not mentioned; Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney and John Bolton, the moustachioed Strangelove of the mid-Bush years, between them merit only seven references in the index. Three of these are to page 84, where Cha unexpectedly records at length ...”

“... new biography, enter his trance, and suddenly transform himself uninhibitedly into Mickey or Donald or an owl or an old hunting dog . . . ‘He would imitate the expressions of the dog, and look from one side to the other, and raise first one brow and then the other’ . . . ‘You’d have the feeling of the whole thing,’ ...”

“... Donald Trump’s​ strategy for succeeding in the November mid-term elections consisted almost entirely of an effort to foment immigration panic. After it failed and he lost his Republican congressional majority he made a feint at appeasing the Democrats, with a deal to keep government running, then threatened to invoke emergency powers to build the wall his right-wing base demands, and at last offered a hint of moderate conciliation ...”

“... have rarely presented a more disheartening spectacle. The repellent and dangerous antics of Donald Trump are troubling enough, but so is the Democratic Party leadership’s failure to take in the significance of the 2016 election campaign. Bernie Sanders’s challenge to Hillary Clinton, combined with Trump’s triumph, revealed the breadth of popular ...”