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“... 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 ...”

“... something much more like a conventional politician, reneging on his pledges, hiring experienced Washington hands to help him negotiate the swamp rather than drain it. It has already started happening. What’s so scary about this prospect is that Trump has no experience of how to do any of it: he isn’t a politician, and the chances are that it will be ...”

“... journalist Joseph Alsop they formed a Three of Hearts in the less fastidious quarters of Washington DC. Another player made up an occasional fourth man. Isaiah Berlin was happy, at least when Charles (Chip) Bohlen was unavailable, to furnish an urbane ditto to their ruthlessness. Almost as if to show that academics and intellectuals may be tough ...”

“... but Trump has tried to turn his victory into a means to compel New Yorkers finally to genuflect. Washington had never held the slightest allure for him – until now when it is leverage over New York. Even so, Washington is strictly Palookaville, a nowhere town for grown-up student council presidents. There is only one ...”

“... many global businesses. It has its headquarters in a handful of Western centres, notably New York, Washington and London. It acknowledges no boundaries and aims nowadays at the dismantling of the sovereign privilege of governments to regulate its product. On this issue, the key battle was won decisively a decade ago, when the UN Security Council endorsed the ...”

“... aged 38, he would return for a second time to play basketball, joining the team he had owned, the Washington Wizards. He’ll spoil things, people said, as they said the last time he came out of retirement, but now with greater conviction. But though I had my doubts, I kept quiet. I had never seen him play before in his splendid flesh. This would be my ...”

“... itself an event – even without the BBC’s extraordinary graphics and the mobile enthusiasm of Peter Snow.’ Now, it’s not especially surprising that the deputy leader of a historic social-democratic party should open an article with a sentence that reads as if hastily translated from the Albanian, or that he should close that article without a single ...”

“... His squaring was famous: Aitken became Lord Beaverbrook, Northcliffe was sent off on a mission to Washington. Squashing was the fate of, for example, the Daily Chronicle, which became improperly critical and in 1918 was bought over by Lloyd George henchmen. By 1918, as peace returned, the press and the way politicians looked on it had changed profoundly. The ...”

“... South. I’d practised my reading with him, I recall, back in the first grade reading my primer, Peter Rabbit.Anderson doesn’t pretend to know more than she knows. ‘I didn’t have him in my pocket,’ she says. But what she does know brings us almost into the room with him:Brother Robert kept his hair neat, using Dixie Peach pomade. He greased Vaseline ...”

“... a runner, he would win the 100m and the 5k, but would be best-known for his marathons. His coach, Peter Nielsen, describes him as an ‘incredibly annoying opponent’ because he is happy to grind away for hours at positions most top players would accept as a tie. He often upbraids colleagues who agree to early draws, arguing that they should play out the ...”

“... that side of the Atlantic, without ever managing to communicate his whereabouts to anyone at home. Peter Ackroyd’s Milton in America (1996) seems curiously, if perhaps unconsciously, parasitic on this earlier extravaganza. Milton, however, despite some fleeting fictional attention from Robert Graves, has never been able to vie with the Romantics in this ...”

“... funny account of provincial literary neurosis, had appeared in book form in 1972, and Peter Carey’s ‘American Dreams’, a post-Vietnam satire, in 1974. David Foster’s first novel, The Pure Land, came out in 1975, and, deceptively to one side in the same year, stood Johnno, David Malouf’s first prose work. ‘It spread, throughout the ...”

“... IRA is not as intimate as the authors claim: Adams – as his series of urgent telephone calls to Washington seemed to show – appeared genuinely not to have known until a few hours before the Docklands bombing that the IRA was about to go back to war after their first ceasefire. And even if Adams is still in the IRA, how significant would this be for the ...”

“... Day 1667, it held out against Greenwich until 1884, when the International Meridian Conference in Washington, having been carefully lobbied, came down on the side of the British, a decision ignored by the French for navigational purposes up to the eve of the First World War. The map that caught Robb’s eye was drawn in 1763 and covered the central provinces ...”

“... Peninsula with the explosive impact of a hundred million hydrogen bombs. The palaeobiologist Peter Ward, writing last year in Nautilus, calls it life’s worst day on Earth, when the world’s global forest burned to the ground, absolute darkness from dust clouds encircled the earth for six months, acid rain burned the shells off of calcareous ...”