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“... of malice, poison and vicious sadism in my soul, and it poured forth freely in the jungles and rice paddies of Vietnam,’ says the narrator of the title story: ‘I committed unspeakable crimes and got medals for it.’ Jones is not much concerned with the cultural or ideological dimensions of the war, beyond noting the bizarre moral warps which convert ...”

“... More objectionable still are the parallels drawn by Donald Rumsfeld and Condoleezza Rice between the Cold War democratisation of West Germany and Japan and today’s project of bringing democracy to the Middle East. The only parallel evident at the moment would be along the lines not of democratisation but imperial control. The end of the ...”

“... The early chapters of Olivier’s Confessions are written in Dickensian pastiche, even borrowing David Copperfield’s opening speculation whether he would turn out the hero of his own life story. The object of this is to characterise the young Olivier as a Dickens child, a version of David, and his father, the widowed ...”

“... aren’t up to the task: he especially has it in for wind, quoting the dismaying statistic from David MacKay’s Sustainable Energy: Without the Hot Air that a four-kilometre-wide belt of offshore windfarms all the way round the coast of Britain would provide less than an eighth of Britons’ average daily energy consumption (according to ...”

“... but the US consistently supported the Israeli position. One American participant at Camp David in 2000 later said: ‘Far too often, we functioned … as Israel’s lawyer.’ Finally, the Bush administration’s ambition to transform the Middle East is at least partly aimed at improving Israel’s strategic situation. This extraordinary generosity ...”

“... are the ‘birth pangs of a new Middle East’, they are very different from those Condoleezza Rice claimed to discern during Israel’s war on Lebanon in the summer of 2006. The first illusion to crumble was the myth of Egyptian passivity, a myth that had exerted a powerful hold over Egyptians. ‘We’re all just waiting for someone to do the job for ...”

“... and as long as our environmental consciousness is tied to the idea of breathtaking scenery or David Attenborough’s ramblings about charismatic fauna, we will be satisfied with the preservation of beautiful symbols. Activists chain themselves to trees while Coca-Cola appeases guilty consciences by printing some arrows in a Möbius loop on the label of a ...”

“... efficient. Smugglers taking the drug into Pakistan hide it in other commodities such as wheat or rice, or in fuel tankers, and use the official border crossings. To enter Iran, the smugglers often run armed convoys through the desert and routinely clash with Iranian border guards. Tehran reports that it has lost 3100 security personnel over the last two ...”

“... bomb exploded at the CPA’s entrance, killing 23 and wounding 95. Karl Rove, not Condoleezza Rice – and not Dick Cheney or Donald Rumsfeld – deals this corner of the game, one of whose objectives is to rebrand the president as a man of peace. Thus, the White House has retreated from pre-emptive and preventive war with both Iran and North Korea, and ...”

“... conglomerates have had to let it go. The Oxford University Press feel no obligation to keep David Gascoyne’s Collected Poems in print. Faber and Faber get along very nicely on Tom Eliot’s singing and dancing pussy-cats. The Cambridge Festival (don’t tell them) is nowhere, it isn’t happening. What’s the story? Even the participants don’t ...”

“... he saw only one notable anatomical difference: a pine-cone shaped gland, the size of a grain of rice. That, he decided, must be the seat of the soul. His brain research wasn’t published during his lifetime. He knew it would cause him too much trouble. In the 19th-century equivalent of Galen’s travelling shows, a curious public looked on as electricity ...”

“... book can readily be compared to works like Judy Garland: The Secret Life of an American Legend (David Shipman), Marlene Dietrich: Life and Legend (Steven Bach), or biographies of the Kennedys. It is characteristic of many such books that they begin far back, with early antecedents, and in the case of Seabiscuit there are many to account for, from Charles ...”

“... are a proper visible expression of forces at work on the structure. The final result, according to David Newland, technical adviser to the bridge’s funding body, is ‘probably the most complex passively-damped structure in the world’. (In an actively-damped system an input of energy is required to answer the force with a counterforce; in a passive ...”

“... exploration of the effect of eye-defects on personality, art and literature. He endorses T. Rice’s epitomes of short and long-sighted personalities which, made some sixty years ago when the climate was more favourable to psychological determinism, are still cogent, if comical summaries. The long-sighted, ...”

“... children and teenagers. Didion points out inanities: subsidies that support the acreage of rice and cotton, both of which need extravagant amounts of water but have only a small market. Yes, that’s dumb, and even crooked. But Didion stops short – as she must – of that old nightmare that Californians are wasting the last drops of water by keeping ...”