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“... this; at the very least, a powerful degree of denial. If global warming is as much of a threat as we have good reason to think it is, the subject can’t be covered in the same way as church fêtes and county swimming championships. I suspect we’re reluctant to think about it because ...”

“... towards, the China of Jiang Zemin. The Clinton campaign of 1992 made quite a point of the Bush regime’s failure to respond to the Tiananmen massacre of 1989; there was much brave talk of ‘the butchers of Beijing’ and the Stalinist gerontocracy, and of the need to employ economic ‘leverage’ for human rights. In those days, the annual ...”

“... noble American sense of mission before he reluctantly took his country into the European war. ‘We are provincials no longer,’ he famously declared in his second inaugural address in March 1917. Though still publicly opposed to American intervention in the war, he insisted that ‘our own fortunes as a nation are involved whether ...”

“... the streets, but they haven’t gone very far. Visiting dignitaries to the Green Zone, whether George Bush, Gordon Brown or Barack Obama, seldom realise the extent of the military operations required to protect them or the impact of these operations on Iraqis, and so get an exaggerated impression of the progress towards normality in Baghdad. Last ...”

“... and the EU sent them to fevered new heights. All this makes it hard to shake the feeling that we are living through a deranged re-run of the Cold War. Of course, the idea of a reprise of the superpower stand-off that dominated the 20th century has been in the air more or less since the actual Cold War ended, the stuff of countless think-tank briefings and ...”

“... democracy than the American-style ‘populism’ practised by politicians from Andrew Jackson to George W. Bush. The word populiste is a deadly insult, most recently deployed by socialists and Chiraquiens alike against anyone who dares interpret the result of the referendum on the European Constitution as a vote of no ...”

“... technology has shifted, making it possible for a small band of zealots to wreak devastation where we least expect it – not a plane next time, but perhaps an atomic bomb in a suitcase or a biotoxin in the water supply. The attack of 11 September is the prototype of similar events that will litter the 21st century. ...”

“... those who’ve been there say: ‘My God! The drive from the airport!’ They mean the drive from George Bush Intercontinental Airport, down Interstate 45 or 59. It’s a ten or 12-lane highway, flanked by teeming feeder roads, and you career along it to the gathering rhythm of power pylons, used car lots, motels, the cacophony of billboards selling ...”

“... weapons. ‘This takes us back to the Cold War,’ he announced cheerfully, ‘where at one point we had thirty thousand nuclear warheads and missiles to launch them’. ‘Welcome to the world of strategic analysis, where we program weapons that don’t work to meet threats that don’t exist.’ This was what Ivan ...”

“... and I questioned some of the Marines. I was made to realise that this is war – and this is what we do.Harris gives the camera a funny look, half shy, half guilty, all of him doubtful that we can understand. It reminded me of the opening of Hiroshima Mon Amour (1959), where the French woman talks about all she has seen in ...”

“... the way our minds work. Why, asked the 19th-century German physician Hermann von Helmholtz, do we see coloured patterns when we press on our closed eyes? Why do amputees still feel their missing limbs? Why is there a blind spot in our vision, and how is it that we don’t perceive ...”

“... a significant political influence: they are places, one protester told me, ‘for seeing how many we are, and how strong we can be together’. As the March protests gathered force, the clubs closed to encourage patrons to demonstrate instead. Andro Eradze, founder of the LeftBank club, was careful to stress that there was ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... think of himself as a ‘liberal’ and still be a committed Cold Warrior. As he says, ‘whether we had a right – any more than the French before us – to pursue by fire and steel in Indochina the objectives our leaders had chosen was a question that never occurred to me.’ His parents were professionals, of Russian Jewish ancestry but born in the ...”

“... bitch,’ he said. ‘This muthafucker is brand new. I want the goddamn thing to work. We’re sure gonna need its ass when we get to New Orleans.’ Sam’s neighbour had chickens outside his trailer and frogs were hiding in the pine trees along the drive. An American flag hung limply on the porch as Sam ...”