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“... BLU-109 ‘bunker-buster’ bombs capable of penetrating up to six feet of concrete. In January, Seymour Hersh reported in the New Yorker that US special forces were already in Iran trying to pinpoint underground nuclear facilities and other potential targets. Earlier this year, US and Israeli forces spent a month testing the ability of Israeli air ...”

“... winding down on his freedom, Snowden still went to bed at 10.30, as he had every night during my time in Hong Kong. While I could barely catch more than two hours of restless sleep at a time, he kept consistent hours. ‘Well, I’m going to hit the hay,’ he would announce casually each night before retiring for seven ...”

“... historians like Theodore Draper, Arthur Schlesinger and Garry Wills, or political journalists like Seymour Hersh, Lou Cannon and Robert Woodward, deal with this difficulty in various ways, but seldom succeed for long in firing the general consciousness. This is because they are either apologists for power (Schlesinger, Woodward) or its intimates ...”

“... its death throes. Nevertheless, I called on the former United States Embassy fondly hoping to pick my way through poignant debris like portraits of Presidents behind crazed glass, and the bust of a bald eagle gleaming dully from a nest of old communiqués. The miserable photographs I had seen of the Embassy failed to do the place justice. The real thing was ...”

“... approach: stealth (‘thy uncle stole/With juice of cursed hebenon in a vial/And in the porches of my ears did pour/The leperous distilment’). But some assassins opt for the Laertean method: in 661 Abd al-Rahman ibn Muljam killed Ali ibn Abi Talib, Muhammad’s cousin, with a poison-coated sword. Seventy years later, the Shia imam Muhammad al-Baqir was ...”

“... of uranium enrichment could be an exaggeration, designed to pre-empt the pre-emptive attack that Seymour Hersh has recently suggested the US is planning for. The ultracentrifuge cascades that are used for enrichment are complex structures, containing some very delicate mechanisms. They have the potential to self-destruct. It might take a cascade of 1000 ...”

“... been largely taken over by an admirable cohort of ‘muck-raking’ investigative journalists – Seymour Hersh, Michael Massing and Mark Danner, writing in the New Yorker and the New York Review of Books. The collapse of liberal self-confidence in the contemporary US can be variously explained. In part it is a backwash from the lost illusions of the ...”

“... six citizens: Kim Hyuck, a young tearaway; Kim Ji-eun, a divorced paediatrician in her thirties; Mi-ran, a kindergarten teacher who defected when she was 26; her former boyfriend, Jun-sang; Song Hee-suk, a lifelong Party loyalist; and her disaffected eldest daughter, Oak-hee. By the time we pick up their stories they are entering a time of extraordinary ...”

“... on his willingness to call things by their right names. It became very plain to me, as I finished the book, that if I were to employ the argot of popular psychology I could say that I had been reading the profile of a serial murderer. Isaacson is probably right to begin with young Henry’s abused German-Jewish boyhood. ‘...”

“... forty years ago,’ Friedman told Pinochet, ‘Chile, like many another country, including my own, got off on the wrong track’ by trying to ‘do good with other people’s money’. It wasn’t a coincidence that Friedman and his allies zeroed in on Chile. For most of the 20th century, many Latin Americans thought democracy and socialism were the ...”

“... of neoliberalism. ‘Heller, you’ve won,’ Galbraith told him in 1963. ‘The president told me to shut up about my opposition to tax cuts.’ If Kennedy’s star has risen in the historiography over the past few decades, it’s not only because he still figures as a martyred saint for American liberals, but because ...”

“... It was the soldiers who were afraid. I will never forget that experience. It completely changed me.’ She watched the Tet Offensive unfold, and like many Americans, finally understood how badly she’d been lied to about Vietnam. She read. She gave birth to Vadim’s child, then separated from him and returned to the US to make They Shoot Horses, Don’t ...”

“... and endeavours rather crudely to align Jerry with a string of black friends and colleagues: ‘My people were slaves as well,’ Jerry remarks to his sceptical black girlfriend, before making an uncomfortable allusion to Ralph Ellison: ‘I enjoyed being an alien. Fuck them. The invisible man. Fine.’ Perhaps more damagingly, Kelman’s satire on the US ...”

“... racy figure. He has always had the money to take risks; and no sooner was he elected as a young MP than he immediately got into an enormous D-notice row with the Government. Precisely because Nixon has no still centre, because he has never known who he is, because he is in some respects a wild chancer, he has always had an element of danger about him. ...”

“... succinctly: ‘Alles kaputt.’ In 1980 a German veteran whom I interviewed for a book told me of a conversation about the massacre with one of those who carried it out, who said confidingly: ‘Speaking as one old SS man to another, Herr Muller, it was nothing. In Russia, we did such things every day.’ The 1953 trial in Bordeaux of 21 of those who ...”