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“... The place I’ve called home for the past year or so is a motel just off Route 1 as it heads down the Pacific coast from Santa Cruz to Watsonville. Late on the night of the earthquake a friend called me from where she lived near Carmel, an hour’s drive south, to tell me what had happened. It was early the next day with me, since I was in southern Ireland, having just buried my mother ...”

“... From the moment of its opening in mid-March to its closing at the beginning of this month abuse descended heavily on the Smithsonian’s ‘West as America’ exhibition in Washington DC. At the heart of the row was something that will figure even more powerfully next year, in the various commemorations of the 500th anniversary of Columbus’s voyage to the New World: how much should Europe’s conquest of the Americas, as treated today in exhibitions and commemorations, reflect the experience of the people on the receiving end of the conquest? The ‘West as America’ exhibition made a very decent attempt to suggest something which turned out to be highly controversial: namely, that the 19th-century artists on display tended to glorify the conquest in a manner that reflected little of the greed, exploitation and mass extermination that actually occurred ...”

“... As he neared the end of a recent diatribe against President Bush for plotting war secretly, and in defiance of the US Constitution, the American journalist Anthony Lewis felt impelled to add: ‘None of this argues that George Bush is a bad man. He is not.’ Years ago Roland Barthes wrote about the bourgeois propensity to think in essences, and nowhere is this more evident than in the way Americans think and write about their political leaders ...”

“... No Iraqi atrocity seized the public imagination more vividly than the charge that in the days following the 2 August invasion of Kuwait Iraqi soldiers murdered at least 312 prematurely born babies by plundering their incubators. President Bush, according to his publicists, had Amnesty’s December report at his elbow as he planned to go to war. (The fact that it was at an elbow normally secluded from human rights reports probably had something to do with the fact that his former Chief of Staff, Craig Fuller, was in the employ of Hill and Knowlton, a PR firm retained by the Sabah family ...”

“... City of Quartz’? Los Angeles is indeed bright, hard, opaque. Even the astonishing sunsets one can see from Interstate 15, looking west towards Pomona, have a sepulchral flush to them as the red light filters through the foul air rolling towards Riverside and the desert seventy miles east of the Pacific. And when the Santa Ana winds blow the other way and clean out the whole basin there’s nothing warm in the colour tones even then, just an eerie depth of field so clear throughout its focal range that it’s hard to keep an accurate sense of perspective ...”

“... to help poor children by ending their entitlement to even minimal welfare support. Although Alexander Cockburn and Ken Silverstein twice call Clinton a Republican president, even the view that he has signed the Contract with America does not go far enough for them. Neither Reagan nor Gingrich, in their view, did much to disturb Washington ...”

“... Much the best way to convey appreciation of Alexander Cockburn’s rousing and combative prose is to quote him at length. The protocols of reviewing, however, preclude such a practice, so one has to resort to the altogether drearier method of describing what he is about. Recently I mentioned to him that I was reading his book in order to review it ...”

“... is a matter which divides them. A few writers are brave enough to admit that they felt sad. Alexander Cockburn, who has always been perfectly lucid about the corruption of Soviet Communism, makes a sardonic prediction about what will follow: ‘accelerating Balkanisation of what was the Union, strife between the Republics, looting of resources by ...”

“... of many nations. In a beautifully produced book, The Fate of the Forest, Susanna Hecht and Alexander Cockburn describe the political background to the ecological disaster in the Amazonian jungle. They start with the conquistadores, the blighting of their hopes, the displacement of the Indians, the wars between land barons and settlers. The crux ...”

“... To begin with, it was unclear what martial law meant. The view expounded by Chief Justice Cockburn to the grand jury which was asked to indict Colonel Nelson – the commanding officer – and Lieutenant Brand for the murder of George Gordon was that it permitted the use of lethal force against those in arms, but for the rest meant the application of ...”

“... success with her caftans.’ Shoes remain a problem. Marching down a Paris boulevard in 1968 with Alexander Cockburn, the compañero of her political phase, her feet are killing her. They stop off to get new footware, but ‘the trouble is I want smart shoes – we are still in a banlieue. I select in the end a pair of brown brogues.’ These are as ...”

“... useful for disciplining errant or over-imaginative reporters into the uses of impartiality. (Alexander Cockburn comes right out and says that its purpose is to convince the public that everything else in yesterday’s Times was historically and morally true.) Anyway, last November the paper ran a ‘Correction’ which is unlikely to be bested: An ...”

“... and Defenders of the Amazon, published in 1990 (and reissued in 2010), Susanna Hecht and Alexander Cockburn argued that capitalist development wasn’t the primary threat to the Amazon. The combined market value of Amazon-sourced beef, lumber, minerals, latex and crops doesn’t add up to much, at least not enough to account for the rate of ...”

“... is not fully an alternative or oppositional figure, not a C. Wright Mills, nor a Chomsky, nor an Alexander Cockburn. It is not only that she doesn’t articulate the full setting of the problems that anger her: she seems unaware of the US policy of acquiring and then disposing of right-wing clients, almost everywhere in the world. True, her Miami is the ...”

“... who caught it, the doctors knew of none that would make much difference. (In this book, Patrick Cockburn concludes that Daniel Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year still offers the soundest advice for those caught in epidemics: run away.) But although this was not Cork’s first epidemic, it was the most vicious. The death toll seems to have been relatively ...”