“... for the US Senate; wrote 17 more novels; lived to memorialise (in essays in this book) his friends John Kennedy, Tennessee Williams, Italo Calvino, Orson Welles, Eleanor Roosevelt, Anaïs Nin ... In this kind of summary Vidal’s life sounds almost comically glamorous and eventful. One of the secrets of his social and professional success lies in the ...”

“... was terrible, and worryingly vague. One of the bankers who had been brought in to rescue Lehman, John Thain of Merrill Lynch, took fright, stepped out of the building, put in a call to the head of the Bank of America, and arranged the sale of his own bank – a bit like popping out to the loo on a blind date and proposing to somebody else. Other American ...”

“... you have a fair recipe for a deal on the return the Heights themselves. Given the new fondness in Washington for the Syrian Government, it is hard to think of any concession which, even after a quarter-century of official petrification, will be welcomed more moistly as a sign of ‘flexibility’. Proceeding across the Allenby Bridge to Jordan. I was ...”

“... for his arrest on grounds of filial disobedience. In America, Lafayette attached himself to George Washington, who appreciated the young man’s companionship, bravery and money. Though Lafayette was a general in name, his role in the army initially had little to do with actual fighting. When the signing of a Franco-American alliance in 1778 brought thousands ...”

“... Thee’ and much that France still offers. There are writers he likes, most of them dead: Ronsard, John Clare, William Barnes (‘love of whose poems seems to me a litmus paper of the genuine’), Auden (‘the greatest of my contemporaries’), George Herbert, Vaughan, Crabbe, Hopkins, Whitman, Campion, Morris, Christina Rossetti, ...”

“... aim, the defeat of Fascism. So after the war, when Philby, rising steadily in SIS, was posted to Washington, one of the first Americans he looked up was James Angleton, who was still, like Philby, in the spy business. Philby, after a spell running SIS’s Soviet desk and a tour of field duty in Turkey, was the new SIS liaison officer with the CIA and the ...”

“... were a mistake. (Didn’t he have one kind friend who could have whispered something tactful?) As John Updike has put it in a very thoughtful fashion commentary on the whole unfortunate business: Ike, for instance, dear Ike with his infallible instincts, would never have let himself be caught in lace stockings, even though he did have the legs for them. I ...”

“... by Bill Clinton, and stayed on through 9/11 up until 2005, when he became the principal deputy to John Negroponte, the first director of national intelligence. In 2006, George W. Bush appointed him director of the CIA, where he stayed until 2009, when Barack Obama replaced him with Leon Panetta. During Hayden’s ten years at the top, the intelligence ...”

“... but perfectly logical from his standpoint. Of what relevance to policy-makers and pundits in Washington is Deng’s long career as a revolutionary, steeled in clandestinity, insurrection and civil war, and the founding and leading of the PRC under Mao? It is only when he is detached from this history, and can be safely treated as a victim of the Cultural ...”

“... became the first Irish emissary to the United States. Maeve was 17 when the family emigrated. In Washington, she took a degree in library science at the Catholic University, and became engaged to the playwright and theatre critic Walter Kerr. He broke her heart. (Years later William Shawn told a colleague that Kerr would never write for the New Yorker ...”

“... to be the outer limit of colonial expansion. For trigger-happy real estate speculators like George Washington, who had ignited the French and Indian War with an ill-planned attack on French forces in Jumonville Glen and who aimed to make his fortune selling land to settlers moving west, this entente was intolerable. ...”

“... selling paintings of rural and woodland landscapes to pent-up urbanites. The gallery, now owned by John Driscoll, moved downtown in 2012 from its stodgier precincts on 57th Street. Unlike the Whitney, which, in its choice of what to exhibit, sometimes seems to have jettisoned most of its pre-1960 holdings in the course of its downtown journey, the Driscoll ...”

“... damage done to others was incidental, part of some larger story that wasn’t going to get told. John Wayne’s film The Green Berets (1968) told another story, but it didn’t tell that one. The cluster of new films about the Iraq War is different in both respects. The war is still going on – indeed has no visible end, in spite of what everyone wants and ...”

“... by covert means in the East is freely available through open sources in the West. A KGB officer in Washington might begin an average day by reading articles on defence and defence contractors in the Washington Post, New York Times and Wall Street Journal, then move on to more detailed scrutiny of Aviation Week and Space ...”

“... the century, the reporters were from the 1950s, with notepads or microphone in hand. ‘General Washington, General Washington,’ Mr Cronkite would call to George Washington, who was about to step into a boat to cross the Delaware and capture the Hessians, ‘do you have a ...”