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“... be thought to have renewed literature by his choice of blood-thirst, and if so why. Like Rainey, Douglas Mao is a consolidator. The ‘solid objects’ he has in mind are those reflected on (and with) by a quartet of eminences: Virginia Woolf, from whose short story the book takes its title, Wyndham Lewis, Ezra Pound and Wallace Stevens. Each eminence ...”

“... attender on the upper echelons of global power. He longs for the world of Tito, Churchill and Mao Zedong, at whose feet he sat. He says whose side he’s still unfailingly on, by sucking up to Iran’s leaders and explaining that Salman Rushdie had no right to cause offence to the Muslim world. His favourite theatre of après-power experience is ...”

“... Edgar Snow, the famous American foreign correspondent, once asked Mao Tse-tung for his appraisal of the social implications of the French Revolution. Mao reflected a while and then, shaking his head, said: ‘I think it’s still a bit too early to tell.’ The late Chinese leader’s caution might seem excessive even to the most obsessive historians ...”

“... hidden in the US archives, are now being declassified. Even more to the point, the key role of Mao’s China in arming and guiding the thirty-year struggle has only now been clarified by the researches of Qiang Zhai, a China-born American scholar, in the archives of provincial branches of the Chinese Communist Party. Taken together, they tell us what we ...”

“... biblical notion of uncleanness, though not for the reason she gives. In Purity and Danger, Mary Douglas identifies ‘unclean’ creatures as those that inhabit multiple realms and live between categories. That’s the source of their ‘danger’. The cormorant – which nests on the ground as well as in trees, and which flies, dives, floats and walks ...”

“... seat with space for visitors to have their pictures taken sitting alongside her bronze replica. Douglas Brinkley’s Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory is the first serious biography of Parks. It is also part of a new series of brief lives of famous individuals written by authors not previously known for expertise on the subjects of their books. Brevity and the ...”

“... not mention the period in the 1930s when he strode up and down the country preaching that Major Douglas and Social Credit were destined to ‘win the world’, until he discovered that Douglas had come out for Franco. Like many egomaniacs, he was extremely interested in his own health, and always ready to swallow the ...”

“... forever and never, oh man.’) ‘I’m not a great big visionary,’ a reclusive novelist says in Mao II (1991): ‘I’m a sentence-maker, like a donut-maker only slower.’ All the same, it’s understood that sentence-making has more in its sights than doughnuts: ‘Every sentence has a truth waiting at the end of it and the writer learns how to know it ...”

“... over China that would put his [the Shah’s] point of view across as Snow’s book had done for Mao’. Admirers of Snow’s book might have a little trouble recognising the title, for where would it be without the word Red? Probably just about where Weidenfeld’s idiotic idea finished up – nowhere. Even the Shah smelled a rat and turned it down. (I ...”

“... tightrope-walkers and waiters in Phrygian caps, though we shall have all of these in abundance. Douglas Johnson, in a customarily masterful essay, mentions two rather finer examples. An immense tower will be built to desecrate the Place de la Bastille, and the entire population of Paris will then be invited to take a brick home with him/her (there will be a ...”

“... red flag was hoisted on Tiananmen, the Gate of Heavenly Peace in Beijing, and Chairman Mao exulted: ‘China has stood up!’ Now, for the first time in 156 years, no alien flag, no foreign soldier, no uninvited official defiles any part of the Chinese motherland, with the exception of nearby Macao, but that tiny Portuguese enclave is due to follow ...”

“... of this period: the airborne toxic event in White Noise; assassination in Libra; terrorism in Mao II; and highway shootings, among other crimes, in Underworld. Which is to say, things get serious, and there’s less levity, much less humour. In ‘The Runner’ the abduction of a child from a park is observed by a jogger and a woman who lives in his ...”

“... all news outlets) has another damaging cyber-trick or two up the sleeves of its Mao-era tunic. Given that US hegemony depends on the continuous reassertion of scientific and technological supremacy, the heavyweight political response to mounting evidence of Chinese and North Korean involvement in cyber-espionage is understandable. But, as ...”

“... deal by a crooked mayor who was later murdered. We still don’t know what to think about General Douglas MacArthur; almost all of us, it seems, would rather forget him. Except writers. There have been more than a dozen biographies of MacArthur. Part of the fascination is his contradictoriness: could the same MacArthur really have been a military genius, a ...”

“... Beijing sent officials to be trained in Singapore, but Peter Sloterdijk’s line that statues of Mao will one day be replaced with ones of LKY now seems a dated exuberance. The meritocratic ideology of Singapore has begun to show signs of wear, and its elite seems incapable of regenerating itself as that of the PRC does. Lee’s pioneer generation – the ...”