“... were the creation of Nato as a bulwark against Soviet aggression, and the provision of Marshall Aid that put postwar Europe back on its feet.Ghervas’s​ chapter on the postwar order , however, is not titled ‘The Spirit of DC’. Truman’s creations were Atlanticist institutions, not European ones. Something different, which was American ...”

“... of the inspector general’. In his just published memoirs, Bremer dwells on infighting within George Bush’s cabinet and his claim that he tried and failed to get the number of US troops in Iraq increased. Bremer also says that he ‘realised there would be corruption at many levels of Iraqi society in the months and years to come. But I also hoped that ...”

“... of East Harlem, whereby the population was moved into large, spacious high-rise flats like the George Washington Houses; the ‘middle-income’ towers (what would now be called ‘luxury flats’) of Stuyvesant Town in Lower Manhattan; and the cultural ‘ghetto’ of the Lincoln Center, itself adjacent to a dense concentration of housing projects. These ...”

“... had understood of Taylor’s screen appeal was A Place in the Sun, a 1951 noirish film directed by George Stevens and co-starring Montgomery Clift. It tells the story of George Eastman (Clift), the poor relation of a wealthy family who is torn between two women: Shelley Winters as Alice, who works in the same factory and to ...”

“... Edwardian countryside, red brick villas behind high beech hedges, looking for Hamstead Marshall. An ancient buttressed wall with a stone panel dated 1665 suggests we are not far off. And here is the church above the road, the tower with an 18th-century look to it and a medieval chapel behind. But it’s locked and no one about who could open it ...”

“... twice a week and we generally went on a Monday and a Saturday. Comedies were best, particularly George Formby, but we took what was on offer, never knowing whether a film had any special merit. Some came with more of a reputation than others, Mrs Miniver for instance with Greer Garson, Dangerous Moonlight (with the Warsaw Concerto) and Now, Voyager with the ...”

“... who hails first shall ask, What ship’s that? then he that is hailed shall answer King George then he who hailed first shall answer Queen Charlotte, and the other shall answer God Preserve.’ If the crews really got out of touch they were to leave messages in bottles at pre-assigned beaches or map readings. It helps also, in reading not Cook but ...”

“... for the two or three days work a month that was involved. In due course he became Lord Lawson. George Younger had reportedly not formally disclosed that he was to leave his post as Secretary of State for Defence before it was announced that he was to join the Royal Bank of Scotland and Murray Johnston Trusts. Having been Mrs Thatcher’s staunchest ...”

“... better options, such as an infusion of jobs and investment in the inner cities: the domestic Marshall Plan many black politicians had long championed. Worse, the ‘politics of respectability’, a prim, middle-class tradition of black protest, had led civil rights leaders to turn away in shame and embarrassment from convicts, the ‘most stigmatised ...”

“... of the US state’s political interests, it was a system and a strategy intended to shore up the Marshall Plan, to exercise ‘veto power’ over Japanese imports, and to help control the spread of Communism in Asia. The oil system, unstable and rickety at best, needed constant fine-tuning. When in 1968 the British announced their intention to withdraw ...”

“... days. Reading Keats’s letters in the latter part of 1931, he encountered the journal-letters to George and Georgiana on the Western frontier of the United States. Eliot earmarked Keats’s strategies: ‘These are trifles – but I require nothing so much of you as that you will give me a like description of yourselves, however it may be when you are ...”

“... in before that Charlie Richardson, leader of the Richardson Gang, was buried here, as well as George Cornell, the gangster shot by the Kray Twins in The Blind Beggar pub. But it was the graves and sentry toys of the unknown children that had lodged in my mind. The trees were bare, filtering light on the tombstones and pointing down at the stories gathered ...”

“... of Ayatollah Khomeini in 1989, the ‘Terrorists’ (in the French-Revolutionary rather than the George-Bushian sense) have been losing ground in Iran. The Presidencies of Hashemi Rafsanjani were a slow-motion Thermidor. Since Muhammad Khatami was elected President in a landslide in 1997, Iran has stumbled towards accommodation, first with the Arab ...”

“... committed on both sides. In Britain, the debacle of his protégé brought the rule of Lloyd George to an end. Philhellene to the last, when he threatened to take the country to war over Turkish successes in October 1922, he was ousted by a revolt in the Carlton Club. The following summer Curzon, abandoning earlier Entente schemes for a partition of ...”

“... there’s every chance we’ll get more of that, not less. Instead of telling people this, George Osborne threatened them with punitive tax hikes if they voted to Leave, a gesture pretty much guaranteed to trigger the big ‘Up Yours’. It also didn’t help that Corbyn didn’t seem able to endorse his party’s line without also slagging off the ...”