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“... Robert Stone​ was the feral child of American literature. He arrived in the world with no one to explain or defend him, except his mother, Gladys. About her we know only stray bits of personal history. The chief evidence that Stone’s father existed is the fact of Stone himself. All other claims – that he was a railroad detective, was a Greek or a Jew, had been killed by a bomb in Shanghai in 1937, even that his given name was Homer – are hearsay, most of them floated by Gladys one day, taken back the next ...”

“... will fall between the dead and those who swear they will remember them. Auden wrote once of powers that direct us. He meant blind chance, but the poem also works for powers who wear suits and mount platforms: It is their tomorrow hangs over the earth of the living And all that we wish for our friends; but existence ...”

“... history of the CIA through the life of Richard Helms, who was director from 1966 to 1973. Much of Powers’s information comes from the spies themselves, and while it is a great achievement to persuade such men to speak, they are masters of what they call ‘disinformation’, and it seems to me that Powers has adopted ...”

“... inhabitants. In a sentence that defined the problem legitimate commerce sought to address, Thomas Malthus went further: ‘The state of Africa, as I have described it, is exactly such as we should expect in a country where the capture of men was considered as a more advantageous employment than agriculture or manufactures.’But what if abolitionists ...”

“... the Green Zone without a military escort.) In February last year, the Washington Post reporter Thomas Ricks described one such facility, the Balad Air Base, forty miles north of Baghdad. A piece of (well-fortified) American suburbia in the middle of the Iraqi desert, Balad has fast-food joints, a miniature golf course, a football field, a cinema and ...”

“... Second World War because they wouldn’t or because they couldn’t? This is the question which Powers addresses in his extensive study of German atomic research: a question finally answered by the recent publication of the secretly recorded conversations between Heisenberg and the other German atomic physicists interned at Farm Hall, near Huntingdon, in ...”

“... tax breaks.) Buffy Summers is a Southern Californian teenager – blonde, 5'3" – with special powers (superhuman strength etc) that enable her to slay vampires with relative ease. Joss Whedon, the show’s creator, came up with the idea because he was tired of seeing small, blonde Californian teenage girls being on-screen victims. Buffy is helped by a ...”

“... Harry Potter of the 1830s, Tom Brown; even harder to imagine anyone settling down to read them. (Thomas Hughes did in fact write a sequel, Tom Brown at Oxford, but it’s never done as well as Tom Brown’s Schooldays: Amazon.co.uk hasn’t even heard of it.) It’s a different matter for young Tom’s Voldemort, ‘that blackguard Flashman, who never speaks ...”

“... develops intricate fantasies of persecution in order to mask the unfaceable fact that the powers that be couldn’t actually give a shit about him. Qantas Flight 10 from Singapore to Melbourne included two complimentary meals. Every passenger on the jumbo jet was supplied with metal knives and forks, twice. The plane landed safely and without ...”

“... it with too small a gun. Ingram is one of three men – the others are the amateur Egyptologist Thomas Douglas Murray (1841-1911) and the fifth Earl of Carnarvon, who died within weeks of opening the tomb of Tutankhamun in February 1923 – whose stories Roger Luckhurst reconstructs in his alluring book, which shows that the mummy’s curse is one of those ...”

“... left to lose long before the invasion. Anyway, the more you hear about ‘freedom’ from the powers that be, the harder it is to hold onto the sergeant’s meaning. The word appears 2210 times on the official White House website, www.whitehouse.gov (‘democracy’, to give a sense of scale, crops up 577 times; ‘oil’, 537; ‘tax ...”

“... with Satan and his rebellious hordes (from Book Six of Paradise Lost): At which command the powers militant, That stood for heaven, in mighty quadrate joined Of union irresistible, moved on In silence their bright legions, to the sound Of instrumental harmony that breathed Heroic ardour to adventurous deeds Under their godlike leaders, in the cause Of ...”

“... momentum for almost twenty years: the nomination battles over Robert Bork in 1987 and Clarence Thomas in 1991 were harbingers. But times have changed since these bitter contests. Bork was a cutting-edge neo-conservative of the 1980s, but his successors may well go far beyond him, striking down laws protecting workers and the environment, supporting the ...”

“... a post-Judeo-Christian civilisation that is subservient to the ideology of jihad and the Islamic powers that propagate it. The new European civilisation in the making can be called a ‘civilisation of dhimmitude’. The term ‘dhimmitude’ comes from the Arabic word dhimmi. It refers to subjugated, non-Muslim individuals or people that accept a ...”

“... in Randall Kennedy’s view: ‘The female Thurgood Marshall will be replaced by a female Clarence Thomas.’ Marshall was the first black justice on the court, a liberal; bad health forced him to retire under George H.W. Bush, and he was replaced by Thomas, a conservative from the far right. The analogy was not ...”