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“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... films we see on TV as ET squiffily flicks from channel to channel is a clip (but why in black and white?) from This Island Earth, one of the most poetic and inventive of 1950s sci-fi movies, in which the desperation of the aliens and their finally sympathetic nature are something of a precedent for this film. It is no coincidence either that there is one from ...”

“... privacy, and executioners became anonymous, their feelings a matter of personal conscience. Jerry Givens was Virginia’s state executioner for seventeen years, ending more than sixty lives. Despite believing that he shared responsibility with the justice system, and ultimately with God, on the day of an execution he couldn’t speak or look in the ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... father’s death. ‘Having held onto these objects of clothing for a lifetime,’ her assistant, Jerry Gorovoy, wrote shortly before her death, ‘by incorporating them into her art she alleviates her fear of separation. This processing is connected to the fear of dying. The need to mark time, which is what these clothes represent, is connected to her ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”