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“... places to buy its sacraments and phylacteries; bumper stickers, for example, saying ‘Jane Fonda: John Kerry with Tits’. Phyllis Schlafly and Tom Wolfe have both described the memorial wall as a ‘monument to Jane Fonda’. A set of urban legends has sprung up around her visit to Hanoi in the summer of 1972: a prisoner of war, ordered by his captors to ...”

“... more. They have been obeying culture instead of nature. Most of their food, like the monotonous rice of southern India – a great place for salt-licking – must have been tasteless and dull, and their lives not much better. In Spanish sinsabor, flavourless, means anything disagreeable. Most diets contain all the salt necessary; extra amounts have been a ...”

“... making up a third of the protein in wheat and existing in every type of grain we consume, from rice to corn to barley. The savoury taste we experience, though, comes from the free form of the amino acid that isn’t bound up in proteins. Some plants are naturally very rich in free glutamate – seaweeds, tomatoes, peas – and provide a hint of Ikeda’s ...”

“... have been key to its transformation. The cultivation of three grass species alone – wheat, rice and maize – has been hugely influential in the development of human society, in many periods accounting for more than half the dietary intake of protein. (In this engaging but lopsided book, Harvey doesn’t bother much with grain crops, their ...”

“... The system finally gave amid ‘native’ discontent over injustices such as the high price of rice, which generated riots and helped create the opportunity for Doe’s coup in 1980. The monuments of the Americo-Liberians – from Monrovia’s masonic temple to the Southern plantation-style mansions around the city – mostly lie in ruins today, chiefly of ...”

“... regaled.’ A life history in which the stomach is wholly absent – you would never know whether John Stuart Mill ever yearned for sweets or felt his tummy rumble – doesn’t seem quite human. It is only in the past decade or so, however (M.F.K. Fisher and Alice B. Toklas notwithstanding), that food has been making the transition from supporting role to ...”

“... loss of her daughter – that fixed her reputation.I never met Didion or her husband, the novelist John Gregory Dunne, but in September 1974 I heard Didion speak one evening in the Branford College common room at Yale. Dunne was there as well, stepping in when her voice began to trail off. I was teaching a non-fiction seminar on Wednesday evenings that year ...”

“... against the authoritarian powers of China and Russia and has found an influential reader in John McCain, an old-style promoter of American toughness. But it’s now quite hard to imagine Hu Jintao and Vladimir Putin, not to mention Osama bin Laden and other ‘enemies of the Free World’, quivering at the thought of a ‘concert of ...”

“... This year’s auction included a brochure from a Charleston estate sale of 1859, offering ‘229 Rice Field Negroes, An Uncommonly Prime and Orderly Gang’. From the 1830s came a silk handkerchief, an Abolitionist keepsake from England, with a picturesque and sentimental vignette of a black mother rocking her baby under a palm-tree; the inscription is ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... The book is bountifully and colourfully illustrated, and the research impressive. (Grantland Rice, though, wasn’t an ‘American poet’. He was a sports writer.) It speaks well for Girouard’s own heroic qualities that he was able to tell the story straight. The sheer preposterousness of some of his material must have offered powerful temptations to ...”

“... Panther party militant and the festival along with it: ‘I think this is a pile of shit while John Sinclair rots in prison.’ (Like Hoffman, Pete Townshend went off-message from ‘the spirit of Woodstock’ at that point. ‘Fuck off!’ he announced. ‘Fuck off my fucking stage!’) But Lang never imagined the festival as a political event and it ...”

“... bud by the fortuitous retirement of one justice followed by the death of another. In appointing John Roberts and Samuel Alito, Bush elevated to the court two jurists with track records of giving the executive branch a wide berth on matters relating to national security. (Once on the court, justices don’t always perform as expected; whether the Roberts ...”

“... microscope, he carved and painted sculptures measurable in microns and millimetres; his Pope John Paul IIholds a cross crafted from a hair divided into sixths, making its width slightly less than the diameter of two red blood cells. His portrait of Little Red Riding Hood, whose diminutive has never been so well-deserved, features a mere speck of a girl ...”

“... start again on a new page: in Hunting Mister Heartbreak (1990), Raban adopts a different identity (John Rayburn, Rainbird) for each place he visits. In Waxwings, set in the ‘virtual city’ of Seattle at the height of the dot.com boom, American reality bites back. A professor’s bookish enthusiasm for the ‘Jeffersonian ideal of life, liberty and the ...”