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“... well down his list of priorities. ‘I don’t care about copyright law,’ he told his friend Peter Eckersley in 2010. ‘Healthcare, financial reform – those are the issues that I work on, not something obscure like copyright law.’ He had a change of heart about freedom of information more generally: he’d started to notice that the government and ...”

“... The voiceover narrative, written by Geoffrey Ward, is remorseless and untheatrical, just as Peter Coyote’s spoken narration is dry, unaccented and a little formal, as if reading out a casualty report. But Burns and Novick seem to understand how specious it would be to make this a tidy, organised report – a history – instead of attempting to ...”

“... nuclear weapons and for launching reconnaissance flights during the Cuban Missile Crisis.Neither Washington nor London saw any reason to end intelligence co-operation at the end of the war. Besides, the US had bigger plans. The UKUSA Agreement – the official name of the Five Eyes founding document – was drafted as a permanent replacement for BRUSA in ...”

“... from their decisions. They must also share the blame for the blowback that struck New York and Washington on 11 September 2001: al-Qaida was an organisation they helped create and arm. The term ‘blowback’ first appeared in a classified CIA post-action report on the overthrow of the Iranian government in 1953, carried out in the interests of BP. In ...”

“... accompanied by an allusive anecdote about the behaviour towards her of the Iranian Ambassador in Washington, Ardeshir Zahedi. Some visitors to the London Embassy at Princes Gate emerge not only unscathed but even unmentioned. And accompanying the volume as it reached me was a press release (so-called) from the publishers, listing items concerning four people ...”

“... the new leader was a disaster. Because Donald Rumsfeld had flattered him by deigning to see him in Washington, Duncan Smith became as willing a slave of President Bush as the British prime minister was. Unlike Clarke, he strongly and unthinkingly supported Bush and Blair’s disastrous and illegal invasion and occupation of Iraq. Conservative voters, who ...”

“... rare that someone is individually responsible for a collapse. My professor at architecture school, Peter Galdi, liked to talk about the Manhattan Bridge. It was then nearly a hundred years old; maintenance on the bridge had been deferred for decades; a thorough survey had been made of its soft spots. No one, Galdi told us, knew what was holding it ...”

“... Doctors (as it is labelled today) which the prince takes to be a portrait of Christ between Saint Peter and Saint John – an intelligent response to the absence of orthodox narrative and to Christ’s apparent age in the painting. By contrast, when confronted by an animated double portrait such as Van Dyck’s painting of the first Earl of Strafford with his ...”

“... or the formation of the Moon, or how a reader reads, while the neutron bomb gets the go-ahead in Washington, and plans are made to station germ-warfare weaponry in Europe?’ He went on: ‘The reason Calvino is such an indispensable writer is precisely that he tells us, joyfully, wickedly, that there are things in the world worth loving as well as ...”

“... opens Inheriting the Revolution with an early 19th-century story of time-travel. A Bostonian, Peter Rugg, who, while heading home on 5 March 1770 (the day of the Boston Massacre) gets caught in a storm, imprudently swears that he ‘will see home tonight, in spite of the last tempest, or may I never see home!’ He is doomed to wander the back roads for ...”

“... New York Sewer, the Stabber, the Plunderer and so on. ‘Here’s the Sewer’s exposure of the Washington gang,’ one cries, ‘and the Sewer’s exclusive account of a flagrant act of dishonesty committed by the Secretary of State when he was eight years old, now communicated, at a great expense, by his own nurse.’ No one but Dickens could make the ...”

“... a pale strapless gown with flowers all over the bosom. How would she not make anyone nervous? Peter Bradshaw has written that Taylor and Clift ‘are almost like reflections of each other; when they kiss, something incestuous and thrillingly forbidden throbs out of the screen.’ Charlie Chaplin told Stevens it was ‘the greatest film ever made about ...”

“... lie abroad for his prime minister (on the ‘dual key’ for Cruise missiles at a briefing in Washington in 1986) and bluff abroad for her (in Paris at the amazing dénouement last November). I have also seen him handle a breaking story which involved the ‘credibility’ of his mistress. This was in the think-tank territory of Aspen, Colorado, last ...”

“... the stream’ and the claim of being a gentleman. In upholding McCarthyism while he was in Washington, for example, he may well have had to meet objections from his superiors at the Times, but he can hardly be said to have occupied a position of signal isolation or courage. Yet he writes as if his prejudice took nerve. Similarly, he describes making a ...”

“... with several days’ notice) and then fall to, licking the same dish. It’s not, to quote Peter Cook in another connection, enough to keep the mind alive. Perhaps it’s a culture of this sort – simultaneously overfed and undernourished – that leads people into the ghastly habit of using familiar first names to describe celebrities they will never ...”