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“... and primary function of all intelligence agencies – to ‘covert action’. By the end of Allen Dulles’s term as DCI (1953-61), the ascendancy of covert action over intelligence analysis was so great that the CIA’s own analysts were not consulted in planning the invasion of Cuba at the Bay of Pigs. Since Watergate, the emphasis has shifted firmly ...”

“... in reductio ad Hitlerum as he bears witness to what’s going on in the megachurches: viewers of Richard Dawkins’s documentary The Root of All Evil? might remember his opening salvo against a pre-scandal Ted Haggard, in which Dawkins said that a New Life Church service reminded him of the Nuremberg rallies. (Haggard eventually chased Dawkins out of the ...”

“... University. There he was taught and befriended – as were his Birmingham contemporaries Walter Allen and Reggie Smith – by a young lecturer in the Classics Department, Louis MacNeice. Reed had a remarkable speaking voice and a gift for mimicry (and for assuming the accents of a class not his own), and as an undergraduate he acted in and produced ...”

“... The judge also asked the jurors if any of them were reading any book. Only one said he was – Richard Wright’s Native Son. When it came down to cutting the jurors to eight, the one person who said he was a book reader was discharged. Perhaps this is why some of our writers, given the chance, become performing seals. John Malcolm Brinnin met Capote ...”

“... form of prayer, invented in early medieval monasteries and much cultivated by the laity, like King Richard III, in the 15th century. Forman’s practice of this old-fashioned kind of prayer is the best guide we have to the kind of Christian he was. Not, by the exacting standards of the seminary priests of his time, any kind of Catholic, or he wouldn’t have ...”

“... she finds she can’t take up because she isn’t a farmer’s daughter, babysits for the poet Allen Curnow’s son, and spends hot afternoons with her sister, comparing her proportions to those of the women in Esquire. Then, when she is 15, her mother inherits £900 and decides to take her daughters back to England. Their father argues but is ...”

“... at Harvard, in Paris, and with various firms, he opened his own office in 1962. Influenced by Richard Neutra, the Austrian emigré who also practised locally, Gehry gradually turned a Modernist idiom into a funky LA vernacular. He did so primarily in domestic architecture through an innovative use of cheap materials associated with commercial building ...”

“... But choosing New York for the convention was overweening even by Republican standards: like Woody Allen, only less humorously, they wanted the sweep of Manhattan to enlarge a panoply of private concerns, and blinded with tears and outrage, they wanted to forge a kind of unity in commemoration of the disaster. Cynicism is not news in politics: the Republicans ...”

“... 1965 people had long been curious about this very famous man. Collections such as the one made by Richard Marsh and Tambimuttu for his 60th birthday in 1948 contained much pleasant anecdote, and there were respectful reminiscences in Allen Tate’s memorial volume of 1966. Meanwhile, off the page, there was some gossip ...”

“... Berkeley Poetry Conference where she would have heard Charles Olson, Ed Dorn, Robert Duncan and Allen Ginsberg, among many others. She thought of herself, I think, as a poet almost as much as a novelist. When she came to use the landscape and culture of the US in Tripticks, she drew on her own experiences and the techniques of the poets and of writers like ...”

“... all. What role, I wondered, can poetry play in such an environment? I had in mind something like Allen Grossman’s admission that he is uncertain what poetry ‘can now mean in the context of the actual human task’. But Seidel simply responded with Samuel Johnson’s line, borrowed from Sidney (who got it from Horace), that poetry must please and ...”

“... in the name of objective science. The cycle was repeated in 1994 with the publication of Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray’s The Bell Curve, which extended Jensen’s basic thesis into a 900-page exposition of the genetic bases of social inequality, crime, poverty and unemployment. In the meantime, a re-examination of Cyril Burt’s work in ...”

“... personals column of the New York Review of Books, placed by a young couple straight out of a Woody Allen movie, who want to swap their house and flee post-9/11 New York for the comparative safety of the countryside; on impulse, Zuckerman offers them his house, on condition that they move out straight away. And finally, after re-establishing contact with Amy ...”

“... Larry Ellison, Alphabet’s Sergey Brin and his former colleague Eric Schmidt. Microsoft’s Paul Allen owned one, as does Charles Simonyi. The tech-bros have grown their businesses courtesy of handsome government contracts and lavish state subsidies, so their superyachts are paid for not just by the labour of those who work in the sector, but also by the ...”

“... security. He’s the only one you can put your complete trust in’: thus Lyndon Johnson to Richard Nixon, 1968. It is not often that a book casts fresh light on American history throughout this century, but this biography of Edgar Hoover does just that. Not only was Hoover, as head of the FBI, America’s leading policeman: he enjoyed an extraordinary ...”