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“... to be attacked. It’s a reminder of the scheming Ahmad Chalabi and his strategic dinners at the White House. Shteyngart has a gift for physical comedy, and Misha gives him nearly unlimited opportunities. Misha’s body – ‘a continent of flesh’ – is depicted again and again throughout the novel. After his unfortunate circumcision, Misha’s penis is ...”

“... a beacon for homosexuals everywhere; Liberty Baptist Church, the fundamentalist empire created by Jerry Falwell, founder of the Moral Majority and America’s best-known ‘televangelist’; Sun City, a retirement community in the Florida sunbelt; and the ill-fated commune in Oregon created by Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, guru of free sex and Rolls-Royces. The ...”

“... diplomat, maybe even an entertainer. As well as being one of the smartest people ever to enter the White House, Obama was also one of the funniest, a natural stand-up, who even managed his turn at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner in 2011, on the night he green-lighted the raid that killed Osama bin Laden. ‘Cool ...”

“... was addressing me as ‘Norman Darling’. My mother said: ‘You know she was married to Jerry! She’s talking nonsense.’ ‘Norman!’ Dad said. ‘I didn’t think you wanted us to see her.’ I noted Evangeline’s breasts, shoulders, arms and hands – and her forehead and her wrists – in that order – with admiration. ‘Mother, where are ...”

“... shop, along with a sign that reads ‘That’s All Folks’). It turns out, as the journalist Jerry Adler writes in the book, that ‘the objects with the best odds of survival were those small enough to have lodged safely in a crevice: keys, coins and rings’; along with golf balls, these things shall inherit the earth. In his introduction to Memory ...”

“... A and selection for trait B when A and B are coextensive: were polar bears selected for being white or for matching their environment? Search me; and search any kind of adaptationism I’ve heard of. Nor am I holding my breath till one comes along. The empirical issue. It wouldn’t be unreasonable for a biologist of the Darwinist persuasion to argue like ...”

“... between his style and that of Dirty Harry are daily discouraged by a pained, overworked White House press office. The apotheosis of all this (‘Where’s the Rest of Me?’ ‘Let’s Win This One for the Gipper!’) came, Rogin believes, in 1981. ‘To confirm the President’s faith in the power of film, John Hinckley, imitating the plot of the ...”

“... maverick one-offs. The infiltration of drug use into all parts of pop music – from black jazz to white rock, from club dancefloors to record company boardrooms, from the fan to the icon – is rarely acknowledged. There tends to be a gap between the public’s perception of pop musicians and the reality. In 1988 Shaun Ryder was asked by a music paper to pose ...”

“... Rockies have been massacred by those unstoppable harbingers of global warming, pine beetles. White pines, the cornerstone of the greater Yellowstone ecosystem, have been the hardest hit by the drought-induced infestation, which now affects perhaps 95 per cent of the iconic trees. With two-thirds of Montana experiencing the most extreme drought in a ...”

“... In Arthur Schlesinger’s court history, A Thousand Days: John F. Kennedy in the White House, which might without unfairness be called the founding breviary of the cult of JFK, there appears the following vignette. Schlesinger had been asked to carpenter a ‘White Paper’ justifying Washington’s destabilisation of Cuba, in which the high-flown rhetoric of the New Frontier might form a sort of scab over the fouler business of empire ...”

“... of those yawning divides of style by which teenagers define themselves. We wore T-shirts of the White Light/White Heat album cover, which could not have existed when the album was originally released. Mere mention of liking the Grateful Dead was grounds for ostracism. In the punk rock schema, the Velvets were Papa (and ...”

“... claiming that he was ‘completely heterosexual’. Things got worse. In May this year, Jerry Falwell, arguably the most influential evangelical of the last three decades, died suddenly of a heart attack in his office at Liberty University in Virginia. Falwell had founded Liberty in 1971 as a private religious college and it played an important role ...”

“... least about moderation – is at an end. The polls, which a scant month or so ago were giving the White House to Ross Perot, are now awarding it to ‘The New Covenant’ (a slogan so treacly in its unction that it died a-borning and is never, ever mentioned even for satirical purposes. Its companion exhortation, ‘Putting People First’, is so vacuous that ...”

“... competing on that circuit. The poor, mostly black inhabitants of the favelas didn’t mix with the white upper middle class living near the beach. Domestic servants, mostly favelados, would go to the beach only at weekends after sunset, when the whites had already gone home. What is a favela? The word refers to a plant native to the state of Bahia, in the ...”

“... the track. The train gathered speed. Languid camels rushed by; dust mounted and turned the scene white. The small screen in our compartment was playing Tom and Jerry cartoons. Tom chased Jerry down the hall with a gun and it blew up in his face. How symbolic of our dictators. I was glad ...”