“... of an unusual kind. In the middle of the Presidential election in which Bush trounced Dukakis, the Washington Post carried two separate attacks on the novel, one by George Will, a conservative columnist and friend of the Reagans. Will said that DeLillo’s novel, because it did not follow the lone-gunman theory about the Kennedy assassination, was ‘an act of ...”

“... makes on a special funeral train, bearing the body of his grandfather, a celebrated senator, from Washington back home to Nashville, Tennessee. Peter Taylor’s grandfather was in fact, as we learn from the sleeve of the novel, a legendary figure in his own lifetime, a much revered governor of the state, and later a senator. But the wholly fictional spell of ...”

“... On 22 June 1996 a Methodist minister, the Rev. Edwin Clever, was taken hostage in his suburban Washington church by a gun-wielding man wearing a ski mask. The intruder strapped what he claimed were explosives to Clever’s body and ordered him to summon a woman in his congregation, Marguerite Bennett, to the church. She was the hostage-taker’s estranged ...”

“... cunning, inventive, industrious. He made a particular success of his time as a liaison officer in Washington. After the war he had another go at journalism, this time as an executive for the Sunday Times, and – older, less flighty – made a success of it. In parallel with this busy career Fleming was engaged in an energetic love life, one in which he ...”

“... in Islamabad. He offered to tell the CIA where to find bin Laden in return for the reward that Washington had offered in 2001. Walk-ins are assumed by the CIA to be unreliable, and the response from the agency’s headquarters was to fly in a polygraph team. The walk-in passed the test. ‘So now we’ve got a lead on bin Laden living in a compound in ...”

“... Hannibal is the FBI of the Ruby Ridge massacre: a poisoned, dysfunctional institution, part of a Washington world of backbiting, infighting and incompetence. First sentence: ‘Clarice Starling’s Mustang boomed up the entrance ramp at the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms on Massachusetts Avenue, a headquarters rented from the Reverend Sun Myung Moon ...”

“... by toe-curling choruses of ‘Happy Birthday’), hand-holding, embracing, chants (‘Hi, John!’). This is evidently necessary to create a structure for the incoming drunk in free fall or those whose sobriety is fragile. The structure is always there and always the same; a reassuringly solid thing in a dangerously liquid world. What is rarely boring ...”

“... two men, or rather this boy and this man, Ahmad Ashmawy Mulloy and Jack Levy, are at the centre of John Updike’s new novel. There can’t be many readers who will begin Terrorist without wondering what Updike – white, Protestant, 74 – thinks he is doing, presuming to be able to inhabit the consciousness of a teenage Arab-American Muslim. Michiko ...”

“... Obama’s promise to withdraw ‘one to two’ combat brigades a month for 16 months. Suddenly, John McCain’s belief that US troops should stay until some undefined victory looked impractical and out of date. The Iraqi government seemed almost surprised by its own decisiveness. It is by no means as confident as it pretends to be that it can survive ...”

“... an evolutionary advantage. Schutt compares their emergence to ‘a farmer moving into town with a John Deere tractor while everyone else is using horse-drawn ploughs’. Pretty quickly – at least in evolutionary terms – fish jaws were bristling with teeth. Some long and thin fish even evolved an additional set of pharyngeal jaws inside their ...”

“... I have observed, is pallid alongside the emotional reactions one sees at the Vietnam Memorial in Washington DC. American grief about the war is mixed with enduring feelings of frustration and anger. Similar feelings remain about Korea. Like Vietnam, it was a ‘limited war’ which fell short of stated goals. The preservation of South Korea was better than ...”

“... our descent. That isn’t what I meant. That long-ago Inauguration Day, 1960, In a bitter cold Washington, D.C., The slender prince spoke without a hat or coat, elegance, eloquence. His death in Dallas practically the next day was intense. That’s how the poem began. It’s time to leave the poem behind. People saw a god trying to be a man. People want to ...”

“... be clear were all indelible. I spent an afternoon with him once in the old Army and Navy Club in Washington. Everything about him held my attention, starting with his history as a counterintelligence officer in London during the Second World War, fresh out of Yale. But it was the man himself, sitting on the edge of an overstuffed club chair, pulling a ...”

“... 1792, the state legislatures in most cases chose the electors, and they unanimously made George Washington president. After that, the trouble started. Initially, each elector cast two votes without differentiating between president and vice president, because it was assumed that candidates would compete as individuals, not as representatives of political ...”

“... state in waiting, ‘indispensable to the continuance and integrity of the Union itself’, as John Quincy Adams described it in 1823. In imitation of British freelance imperialists such as James Brooke, the ‘white rajah’ who ruled the state of Sarawak on Borneo as a private fiefdom in the mid-19th century, America produced its own brand of ...”