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“... a Tory MP, and died a hero on the battlefield in May 1917. Val had two sons, the elder of whom, Peter, b. 1907, inherited the tendency to be a paragon, and the younger of whom, Ian, b. 1908, inevitably became the family handful. Things were not helped by the wills of Val and Robert, which absent-mindedly or maliciously left the boys’ mother, Eve, with not ...”

“... heads the Venice Biennale this year, and Lynne Cooke, senior curator at the National Gallery in Washington, continue to produce ambitious theme shows à la Szeemann and König. But a problem had already emerged in the 1990s: as some artists began to act as curators, rooting in storage rooms and exposing objects that museums would prefer not to exhibit, some ...”

“... actually said seems unpromising. On 29 December 1967, standing before his fellow economists in Washington DC, he spent most of his presidential address explaining ‘What Monetary Policy Cannot Do’. When he finally turned to guidelines, Friedman permissively allowed that the authorities might reasonably seek to target either the exchange rate or the ...”

“... assume in the mind if its metropolis were taken to be, not New York or Boston, Philadelphia or Washington, San Francisco or LA, but what the historical records establish as older than any of them, the most ancient city of North America: Santa Fe, New Mexico. And in the years since, that appealing perspective has never been lost sight of ...”

“... as the CIA’s private venture capital firm. One of Palantir’s founders, the billionaire Peter Thiel, described Christopher Columbus as ‘the first multiculturalist’, accused Aimé Césaire of not understanding the transcendental value of The Tempest and advocates for cyberspace, outer space and sea-steading as routes of escape from ‘the ...”

“... era of Colin Davis (1971-86). Things, indeed, began to fall apart when Davis’s partnerships with Peter Hall and Götz Friedrich broke down. Tooley dutifully chronicles the years from 1947 to 1988, but only comes alive in his final 80 pages, with a disgruntled assessment of his successor. Isaacs for his part is critical, if not harshly so, of Tooley. He ...”

“... American press with its footage of civilian casualties and unhappy American conscripts that the Washington Post implied its reporter should be censored. Or it could be as racy as a good thriller: an award-winning edition in 1978 investigated a mysterious company called Otrag, which had links to former Nazi missile scientists and had acquired part of Zaire ...”

“... allowed to marry in the South of France, with both mothers in attendance. The early sections of Peter Sussman’s Decca, a vast collection of Mitford’s letters, cover this period. For those who take pleasure in the ironies of epistolary communication (or non-communication), there are some gems here. One is the clever forgery, written by Mitford and ...”

“... figures to lend him a cloak of respectability. Figures such as Haines, Bernard Donoughue and Peter Jay, the former British ambassador in Washington – some of the stars of the Labour governments of the 1970s – were happy to be signed up to Maxwell’s payroll. The case of Haines was especially striking: when Maxwell ...”

“... hanger-on (Lance Price); a memoir by its most senior diplomat, the former ambassador to Washington Sir Christopher Meyer; and now memoirs by the former prime minister’s wife, his deputy and his bagman. The granddaddy of them all, Blair’s own memoirs, are still to come. It is an unprecedented cascade of memoirs by prominent figures in a ...”

“... of Bush and Saud; the Carlyle Group and its ties to bin Laden family assets; the influence in Washington of the Saudi ambassador, Prince Bandar; no-bid contracts; and so on. But there is no need for conspiracy theories: never has a conspiracy been less interested in concealment. The report of the Energy Task Force led by Dick Cheney, which was crafted ...”

“... and international opposition. More important, however, was the weakness of the British economy and Washington’s determination to undermine the pound if the invasion went ahead. In 1989 Washington’s indifference to UN protests against its actions showed how the value put on such pressure had declined in the intervening ...”

“... as America’s principal client in the Middle East, a vassal state supporting the finances of Washington’s poorer allies in the region – Egypt, for example – while buying off the suspicions of those less enthusiastic about American policy in the region, especially Syria. The desire of Saudi Arabia and Kuwait for new American tanks, fighter-bombers ...”

“... Eleanor Roosevelt to ask for help, she phoned her husband and ended her request with a threat: If Washington refuses to authorise these visas immediately, German and American émigré leaders with the help of their American friends will rent a ship, and in this ship will bring as many of the endangered refugees as possible across the Atlantic. If necessary ...”

“... were when Brown took over. ‘Master of his universe’, Rawnsley wrote in the Observer then; Peter Hennessy could recall nothing on this scale since ‘the cross-party war cabinet in 1940’; and Jackie Ashley thought Brown’s early success showed ‘how deeply he can reach into Tory England’. By September last year, however, Martin Kettle was summing ...”