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“... the film asks. The film’s question is, ‘Who do we want our central character, in this case Dick Cheney, to have been, and how far did he oblige?’ Cheney, played by Christian Bale, whose other larger than life roles include Bruce Wayne, Patrick Bateman and Jesus, looms effectively in the film, as he should – nothing is quite so visible in a movie as ...”

“... The two things that everyone knows about Dick Cheney are that he was once the CEO of Halliburton and that he has for the past six and a half years been the most powerful vice-president in American history. In four long articles published in the Washington Post at the end of June, Barton Gellman and Jo Becker revealed much that was previously unknown, if not entirely unsuspected, about the way Cheney operates ...”

“... last public appearance), and left one wondering how they had managed to stay together so long. Dick Heckstall-Smith defines a band as ‘a passengerless collective’, but he doesn’t say ‘driverless’, and his often rivetingly interesting book, which deals largely with the breakup of bands, frequently demonstrates that conflict is bound to occur ...”

“... evenhandedly balancing an appreciation of a British product of by and large the same generation, Dick Davis’s In the Distance. And does any one recognise how rare it is, this saluting by a senior poet of juniors who are by no means of his stable, in no sense his ‘followers’? This is generosity: a virtue recommended in the verse and often embodied ...”

“... of him in terms of lip-biting regret. In fact, let’s have Bill’s dust-jacket endorsement of Dick in full: I think he is, first of all, brilliant, tactically and strategically. Secondly, with me he’s always been very straightforward and honest, the bad news as well as the good and, if possible, the bad news first. Thirdly, he knows how I think, and he ...”

“... Senator Joseph Biden, Democrat from Delaware, say that the number was closer to 4000; I heard Donald Rumsfeld say: ‘The fact of the matter is that there are 130,200 who have been trained and equipped. That’s a fact. The idea that that number’s wrong is just not correct. The number is right.’ I heard him explain the discrepancy: ‘Now, are some ...”

“... people to whom he pays just tribute here. Grace Wyndham-Goldie added breadth to his vision and Donald Baverstock erratic flair. As DG, he was monarch of all he surveyed and could not see as far as he thought. Certainly an unfair disadvantage under which he suffered was the need to be seen as Director-General in something of the old style of that office, at ...”

“... was hardly concerned with Frank Richards as a novelist or (despite his essay’s title) the art of Donald McGill. A better reason for paying attention to humble work is to identify its virtues. At worst, this can become highbrow slumming – overpraising incompetence like an eager nursery teacher or a too-democratic exponent of ‘community arts’. Yet, when ...”

“... The​ most enduring blight left behind by Donald Trump, long after he has smashed things up, will be the pile of books devoted to trying to make sense of him. It will grow after investigative journalists have spent years diving for hidden records, exploring subterranean corporations and foreign partners but never reaching the dark ocean bottom ...”

“... former journalists, including Weil. At the start of the 1980s, Chanos led the Forbes reporter Dick Stern through the tangled finances of Baldwin-United, which was Chanos’s first short; the company was a piano-maker which, at that point, had – somewhat bizarrely – diversified into insurance services. Twenty years later, a tip-off from Chanos helped ...”

“... Donald Rumsfeld, you could say, has had a remarkable career, stretching from a middle-class upbringing amid wealthier neighbours on the edge of Chicago, through Congress and high office in the Nixon and Ford administrations, including a spell as secretary of defense, a profitable excursion into business, and finally six tumultuous years heading the Pentagon under George W ...”

“... forces in their support? This is even more dangerous ground. Soon after the end of the Cold War, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perle proclaimed that the strategic aim of the US should be to prevent any peer competitor to the US emerging anywhere in the world by means of unilateral world ...”

“... by the mascot to help him dunk.I should specify that all these rituals were performed so that Donald Trump would lose. A disclaimer that Joe Biden was not my candidate is hardly necessary; after the primaries, he was no one’s candidate, really. The Biden-Harris ticket was like being handed one of Gary Larson’s Cow Tools and being screamed at for not ...”

“... between two teenagers that, in a normal country, would hardly have become a catalyst for violence. Dick Rowland, a Black 19-year-old who worked shining shoes, bumped into an elevator operator, a 17-year-old white woman. Perhaps he tripped. In any event she screamed and rumours spread that a Black youth had assaulted a white woman in downtown Tulsa. Rowland was ...”

“... At around 9 p.m. on 9 December 1992 Nigel Bartlett was walking down a quiet suburban street near Wood Green in North London when a man began to follow him. The man – Bartlett said he looked ‘like the Michelin man’ – started walking backwards in front of him and asked him if he was the devil, and then if he was happy. He had something in his hand; Bartlett thought it was a knife as it glinted in the streetlights, but then realised it was a screwdriver ...”