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“... Last January​ , the unpronounceable Reince Priebus, chairman of the Republican National Committee, surveying his party’s throng of presidential aspirants, tweeted: ‘It’s clear we’ve got the most well-qualified and diverse field of candidates from any party in history.’ Why, the world wonders, did they end up with Donald Trump as their nominee? The primary voters could have picked Rick Santorum, the former senator from Pennsylvania, once the third-ranking Republican in the Senate, and, with four million votes, the runner-up to Mitt Romney in the 2012 primaries ...”

“... Donald Trump​ vowed that the ‘convention in Cleveland will be amazing!’ It will probably be the only campaign promise he ever fulfils, but indeed, as watched on television, it was amazing, unlike any other, if not quite, as he later summed it up, ‘one of the most peaceful, one of the most beautiful, one of the most love-filled conventions in the history of conventions ...”

“... Week one:​ 3-9 May. Along with toilet paper, which remains scarce, condolence cards are sold out, though birthday cards are plentiful. Popular images include a trail of footprints in the sand and an angel with its forehead pressed into the crook of its arm.As confirmed American coronavirus deaths pass 67,000, the president declares, in an interview with Fox News held inside the Lincoln Memorial, where events are traditionally banned: ‘They always said nobody got treated worse than Lincoln ...”

“... As dozens​ of lagoons of pig waste overflow in North Carolina, President Trump says that Hurricane Florence is ‘one of the wettest we’ve ever seen, from the standpoint of water’. (In North Carolina 9.7 million pigs produce ten billion gallons of manure a year.)*President Trump says: ‘I hope to be able to put this up as one of my crowning achievements that I was able to expose something that is truly a cancer in our country ...”

“... In​ the concentration camps for migrant children, they sleep on a concrete floor with a single blanket, often made of mylar. It is so crowded that the older children try to sleep standing so that the younger ones can stretch out. The lights stay on 24 hours a day. They wear the clothes they arrived in, days or weeks or months before. They rarely have soap, toothbrushes or showers ...”

“... In 1992, a year after the first Gulf War, I heard Dick Cheney, then secretary of defense, say that the US had been wise not to invade Baghdad and get ‘bogged down in the problems of trying to take over and govern Iraq’. I heard him say: ‘The question in my mind is how many additional American casualties is Saddam worth? And the answer is: not that damned many ...”

“... In 2005 I heard that Coalition forces were camped in the ruins of Babylon. I heard that bulldozers had dug trenches through the site and cleared areas for helicopter landing pads and parking lots, that thousands of sandbags had been filled with dirt and archaeological fragments, that a 2600-year-old brick pavement had been crushed by tanks, and that the moulded bricks of dragons had been gouged out from the Ishtar Gate by soldiers collecting souvenirs ...”

“... and their wild doings, the angels and their extraordinary powers, now mischievously recorded by Eliot Weinberger, may have helped enliven the days assigned to them. The strangeness of such religious material again and again makes it incomprehensible that such figures should be considered holy, but if you look instead at their adventures as a remedy for ...”

“... up straight and stops thinking.’Jacqueline Rose is a co-founder of Independent Jewish Voices. Eliot Weinberger 1. Who remembers the original dream of Israel? A place where the observant could practice their religion in peace and the secular would be invisible as Jews – where being Jewish only mattered if you wanted it to matter. That dream was ...”

“... in 1990. Late in life he became a prolific political commentator on television and elsewhere – Weinberger puts it kindly when he evokes Paz’s ‘anti-authoritarian European-style socialism’ and says he ‘was considered right-wing by the Latin American left’. Other observers have felt that Paz was an old-fashioned liberal who perhaps didn’t know ...”

“... dyed red. In her book La Wik’uña, drawing on her research in the Andes and translated by Eliot Weinberger and Suzanne Jill Levine, Vicuña writes that ‘Quechua, the sacred language, is conceived as a thread.’ She adds that it might derive from q’eswa: ‘a rope made from twisted reeds’. In this schema, where both speech and textile are ...”

“... Bunting and Rakosi were included. In came Pound alongside Williams. But so did disparate work by Eliot, Kenneth Rexroth, Mary Butts and others. Once again the team colours that Monroe had asked Zukofsky to supply had run in the wash. Still, the core Objectivists knew what they didn’t like. For instance, the ‘semi-allegorical gleam’ of Symbolism ...”

“... Bernard-Henri Lévy and Daniel Cohn-Bendit, the German Green MEP, berated the New York poet Eliot Weinberger and myself for opposing the bombing and occupation of Afghanistan. Lévy had told the Berlin audience that he was a bit jet-lagged since he had just returned from Kabul, where he had met with the implanted leader Hamid Karzai and launched a ...”

“... and the veracity of The Painted Bird by Jerzy Kosinski has been questioned by many, including Eliot Weinberger. The reaction to these discoveries has been oddly mixed. When doubts began to circulate about Fragments, Deborah Lipstadt wrote in the Forward that if the story told there were untrue it ‘might complicate matters somewhat’, but that it ...”

“... Octavio Paz occupies a unique position in the Spanish-speaking world. He is the foremost living poet of the language as well as being one of the most authoritative interpreters of the Hispanic situation, a pensador in the tradition of Unamuno, Ortega y Gasset, Rodo and Mariategui. Poetry, however, has always been the vital source of his ideas. His work as cultural historian, political essayist and editor of Vuelta, the most influential journal in Latin America today, is rooted in his belief that the poetic conscience must be brought to bear on the central issues of contemporary history ...”