“... all. In 1938, a disappointingly low-level Russian calling himself ‘Michael Green’ appeared in Washington and acquired from Straight a few mildly private memoranda on general themes prepared for the State Department. Straight also handed over some essays in which he suggested to Stalin that his foreign policy was destructive and mistaken: ‘Green’, if ...”

“... in the White House make up the intelligence as they go along?”’ The complaints focus on what Washington did not have: any advance warning from the assumed source of the attack. The military intelligence community has for years produced a highly classified early morning intelligence summary, known as the Morning Report, for the secretary of defence and ...”

“... She married a young Air Force officer, and became, in her twenties, an important personality in Washington society. Her main male friend outside her collapsing marriage was the Ambassador in Washington of the new Fascist regime in Italy, Prince Gelasio Caetani, an attractive and powerful propagandist for Mussolini. While ...”

“... Police. Alas, such humorous anecdotes will not be found by Berlin devotees in his latest book, Washington Despatches. Berlin was actually on his way to Moscow as Press Attaché when he was dismissed by the British Ambassador, Sir Stafford Cripps, then greedily snapped up by our men in New York: by 1942 he had become a member of the Survey Section of the ...”

“... Foreign Secretary, would have none of it. Smarting from the way he’d just been talked down to in Washington, Bevin insisted that being taken seriously by the US now depended on having the bomb: ‘We’ve got to have this thing over here, whatever it costs. We’ve got to have the bloody Union Jack on top of it.’ When Stalin mounted the Berlin Blockade in ...”

“... In the Forties and Fifties there used to be a series of Confidential books – Washington Confidential, New York Confidential and so on – turned out by Jack Lait and Lee Mortimer. The fearless duo, shrouded in their macintoshes and trilbies, would bring the naive reader the straight dope from the lower depths. They practised the same combination of rough-hewn populism and right-wing politics as a Mickey Spillane thriller or a contemporary Reader’s Digest ...”

“... was devoted to East-West relations. At its first session a musty-looking gentleman called Sir John Lawrence proposed that we begin from the assumption that the decline of the Soviet economic system had passed the point of no-return. Any policy recommendations must therefore reckon with the consequences of its collapse within the next few years and the ...”

“... in the Tasaday story and it was through them that much of the information was channelled. One was John Nance, an Associated Press combat photographer who had been wounded in Vietnam and recently posted to head AP’s Manila bureau. It was largely through Nance’s books, such as The Gentle Tasaday, together with National Geographic’s idyllic pictures ...”

“... the novelist to choose from. He could, for instance, have picked on the investigative journalist John Kenneth Turner, who travelled to Mexico in 1908 and discovered that Diaz’s wonderfully healthy economy was based on massive slavery and the slaughter of the Yaqui Indians. Turner wrote up his findings in a series of slashing articles later collected as the ...”

“... book which would summarise the recent work on mammals and help us to think realistically about it. John Eisenberg has now written that book; it is hard to imagine anyone else who could have done so. He has studied a range of mammalian species in the wild. As assistant director of the Washington zoo, he has a wide familiarity ...”

“... the pendulum has swung more sharply in the opposite direction than at any time since the days of John Foster Dulles. The Clark Amendment has been repealed and Congress finds itself fighting a losing rearguard action against the White House practice of bypassing its prohibition against direct CIA involvement in Nicaragua by resorting to the familiar use of ...”

“... part of the Northwest Passage, the so-called ‘Arctic Grail’. From Martin Frobisher in 1576 to John Franklin in 1845, generations of European explorers searched for a navigable route through the Arctic islands to Asia. Many of them – including Franklin and his men – died in the attempt. Their greatest challenge was sea-ice, which has almost always ...”

“... and the movie I selected, or, as a matter of fact, my daughter Tricia selected it, was Chisum with John Wayne. It was a Western. FDR was known to admire Myrna Loy and Ike to enjoy watching shoot-’em-ups; underdog Harry Truman had been inspired by Frank Capra’s 1948 State of the Union and, as the son of a sometime Hollywood mogul, Kennedy was groomed for ...”

“... where the security forces reportedly gang-rape prisoners and the elite squirrels money away in Washington bank accounts while half the population lives in poverty. As China becomes the first nation since the Soviet Union to challenge America’s pre-eminence, what kind of power will it be? China’s breakneck economic growth has made the Chinese public ...”

“... The last two years, in which capitalism has suffered one of its periodic shocks, have given John Maynard Keynes a new lease of life. Events have demonstrated the limits of the theory that economies can be relied on to be stable if they are lightly regulated and otherwise left to themselves. There is now much talk of the paradox of thrift, whereby the rational choices of individuals can prove collectively ruinous, and of the need for government to counteract the inherently anarchic tendencies of markets ...”