“... agents themselves.’ This activity arguably contravenes the Biological Weapons Convention, which Nixon signed in 1972, since signatories to the BWC undertake ‘never in any circumstances to develop, produce, stockpile or otherwise acquire or retain … microbial or other biological agents, or toxins whatever their origin or method of production, of types ...”

“... dear and one of the funniest grotesques in America’, accepted the ‘stipend’ on behalf of ‘Richard Python’. ‘The great fiction story is now being rehearsed before our very eyes, in the Nixon administration,’ Corey announced. He described Gravity’s Rainbow as ‘a small contribution to a certain degree, since ...”

“... blamed the epidemic in the US on Turkish poppy fields. A drug epidemic expedited by war gave the Nixon administration a useful alibi for its War on Drugs in Latin America, and for the creation of a vast prison infrastructure in the US. In a 1994 interview with the writer Dan Baum, Nixon’s aide John Ehrlichman explained ...”

“... was the best book about espionage he had ever read. It is a 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 ...”

“... power to order the strike. What, if anything, could prevent the president – at the time, it was Nixon – from making a catastrophic decision? (‘That raised the hair on the back of my neck, a little bit,’ Hering remembered in an interview with Radiolab earlier this year.) His instructor requested that he put his question in writing. ‘There’s ...”

“... I won’t have a warm retrospective feeling about Margaret Thatcher. I don’t see Reagan or Nixon in a new perspective with the passage of time. And I still loathe my wicked stepmother. This last is what needs acknowledging, because as I read Mary Whitehouse’s letters, everything about her, except the trim tailoring, reminded me of my wicked ...”

“... best brains in the country. So what went wrong? The United States, of course, at the height of the Nixon-Kissinger era, was a bitter and implacable opponent, throwing money into subversion, cutting off access to multilateral capital flows and orchestrating a worldwide economic boycott in protest against the nationalisation of the American copper companies. The ...”

“... paranoid.’ ‘The student movement took such a paranoid view of Nixon.’ ‘Nixon was a paranoid.’ ‘Don’t be so paranoid.’ ‘You’re so oversensitive, Neve, so paranoid.’ ‘Paranoia’, as a word, has gone far into popular usage. In some ways, astonishingly so, since its place ...”

“... to believe that, when someone is, like Reagan or Thatcher, greatly successful or even, like Nixon, a spectacular failure, there must be something special, almost magical about them as a person. In the wake of Reagan’s second and Thatcher’s third election victory we had to endure a surfeit of this sort of thing. And yet the truth is so prosaic. Mrs ...”

“... Louise Bourgeois is one of the two pre-eminent sculptors working today; the other is Richard Serra, whose sculpture – single-minded, monolithic, public – offers the most striking contrast to hers in both form and content. Serra is Isaiah Berlin’s hedgehog exemplified in heavy metal: Louise Bourgeois is the fox, an artist of many devices, to borrow a Homeric epithet which suits her perfectly ...”

“... disable Iran’s nuclear programme.But there were other voices. In an article in Foreign Affairs, Richard Haass, a former head of policy planning at the US State Department, outlined a compromise that would limit but not end Iran’s ability to enrich uranium: it would be allowed to continue enriching uranium for use in civil nuclear reactors to produce ...”

“... Faced with growing competition from Western Europe, Japan and East Asia, the US under Richard Nixon dismantled international financial barriers in order to ‘liberate the American state from succumbing to its economic weaknesses and . . . strengthen the political power of the American state’, as Peter Gowan puts it in The Global Gamble ...”

“... he would need to face the potentially devastating coverage meted out almost daily to Presidents Nixon and Carter, and to the beloved great communicator himself. He had all the money he needed, media people easily as tough as Bush’s, and the advice of another liberal Governor, Cuomo of New York, who had managed to brush off similar mud-slinging. But ...”

“... the left-wing filmmakers Joseph Losey, Carl Foreman and Abraham Polonsky, the screenwriters Richard Collins, Ring Lardner Jr and Waldo Salt, the critics Harold Clurman and Ken Tynan, the musicians Larry Adler and Yip Harburg, as well as Ingrid Bergman, Constance Cummings and Katharine Hepburn. Most of the expatriate film people Sayre met in Frognal had ...”

“... of the secret mind control programmes that the CIA ran through the 1950s and 1960s. After Nixon’s men were caught breaking into the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee in June 1972, Richard Helms, then director of the CIA, refused to help with the cover-up. In February 1973, after his ...”