“... an assistant to the premier/KCIA chief, acting, for example, as his interpreter with President Kennedy, before launching on a successful ambassadorial career. A third important KCIA Moonie was Sang Kil Han, who became military attaché at the Washington Embassy. All these young officers were fluent Anglophones, and major links in the tight CIA-KCIA ...”

“... well known that the much more authoritative Rampersad (the author of books on Langston Hughes and Richard Wright) had been at work for several years on a definitive biography. Rampersad had signed an agreement with Fanny Ellison and her lawyers that gave him full access to the Ellison papers. Jackson had only partial access. When a young professor publishes a ...”

“... between thought and action, and because it seems that if there had been more men like him, Edward Kennedy might not have become politically prominent. The book’s final section is a series of heavy-footed divagations on the ‘organic community’ and the theme of country v. city. Its four essays are concerned with George Sturt, the Hammonds, the Parisian ...”

“... October 2021. The party was polling in the low single digits. Only a few hundred people turned up. Richard Tice, who had replaced Nigel Farage as leader seven months earlier, had chosen to hold the event on the same day – and in the same city, Manchester – as the Conservative Party Conference. He hired a battle bus with a sound system to drive past the ...”

“... and, in the 1960s at least, combative with almost everyone who worked on a film with him. When Richard Attenborough asked James Coburn why McQueen was so rude to him and all the other British actors on The Great Escape, Coburn replied: ‘Paranoia.’ While plenty of other actors, Mitchum included, were cheated by Hollywood, McQueen did well out of it, but ...”

“... so archaic, so self-confounding, so remote from the basic American consensus, ever got so far?’ Richard Hofstadter asked. Graffiti artists shared the intelligentsia’s disdain and defaced Goldwater’s campaign billboards, appending the word ‘Wing’ to his slogan ‘In Your Heart You Know He’s Right.’ Others added the coda: ‘In Your Guts You Know ...”

“... Gasp at the scale model. Blush at the hubris of the promotional displays. Giant blow-ups of ‘Richard Rogers’s original sketch of the Greenwich Dome’ are twinned with ‘a sketch design for a dome by Sir Christopher Wren’. The puny scale of St Paul’s Cathedral is set against the enclosed acres of the tent on Bugsby’s Marshes. ‘This awesome ...”

“... 1953. On every visit the congressmen trawled for witnesses with a maximum of tabloid publicity. Richard Nixon’s career was partly forged on the first of these occasions. He served on the original committee, and would soon run for the Senate. Reagan’s earliest thoughts of switching to politics seem to have come just after the war during a sojourn at Lake ...”

“... It employed no reporters – news items were prepared from Reuter’s agency copy – until Richard Dimbleby, a reporter on Southampton’s evening newspaper, applied for a job with a bold letter suggesting that some members of the news staff might be called ‘BBC reporters or BBC correspondents’ and ‘held in readiness, just as are the evening ...”

“... In the evenings, after dinner in hall, groups would take shape informally in the quad. There was Richard Cobb’s lot, making for the buttery and another round of worldly banter. There was this or that sodality, taking a cigarette break or killing time before revision. There was my own cohort, usually divided between the opposing tasks of selling the ...”

“... specialists out of the policy-making process. Wills gives the example of the Bay of Pigs, when Richard Bissell, the head of the CIA’s Directorate of Plans, kept his plan to invade Cuba from the CIA’s own experts. Wills also says that ‘nominally’ subordinate executive branch agencies kept important security information from the ...”

“... graduate, the daughter of a Cornell professor who spent some years as a professor at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, the daughter of Labour intellectuals who has been for decades one of the most intelligent and principled voices on the left. But Williams has been oddly ambivalent about that inheritance. As an adolescent, she irritated her mother ...”

“... of Sea Power upon History (1890), we might stress the derring-do of the Royal Navy, or – as Paul Kennedy did recently – the role of public finance. Brewer concentrates on organisational factors, and isolates three that were crucial. First and foremost, Britain’s army and navy trebled in size in the century after the Glorious Revolution. By the 1740s, the ...”

“... were not so happy: they feared a balance of payments crisis. But when in 1963 President Kennedy tried to stem currency outflows by taxing the interest on foreign securities, in an effort to reduce the incentive to export dollars to more lucrative overseas markets, it had the opposite effect, and produced what Shaxson calls ‘a stampede for the ...”

“... but hints at his opinion of the situation by regarding Martin Luther King and the late President Kennedy as his two idols. Whilst in his final year, Archer led a small demonstration against the final quashing of the death sentence appeal made by Carl [sic] Chessman. It was a move that brought him his first newspaper interview and with it a passionate dislike ...”