“... acidulous sister-in-law, Madame Nhu, as ‘barbecued monk’. In one of his last decisions John Kennedy assented to a coup to overthrow Diem, although there is no evidence that he foresaw the murder of Diem and his relatives. Diem was killed on 2 November 1963. On 22 November Kennedy himself was assassinated. He had ...”

“... These men and women had been noticed before: they were the ‘silent majority’ invoked by Richard Nixon. The speechwriter who coined that phrase, Pat Buchanan, would become the insurgent Republican of the 1992 primaries, and at the 1992 party convention he gave a speech that seems the prototype for Trump’s inaugural. In fact, Trump delivered no ...”

“... mirror on the opposite wall. There is a tendency to discuss these pictures as documentary. Thomas Kennedy writes in the Tate catalogue that Sickert is offering ‘realistic representations of people who visited music halls … His works show how people unconsciously engage with the social performative act of being part of an audience.’ But though the ...”

“... after Trump had claimed that Cruz’s father was directly involved in the assassination of John F. Kennedy and repeatedly commented that Cruz’s wife was much uglier than Melania, even posting comparative photos of the two. Now Cruz, in an unexpectedly tight race, has implored Trump to come to Texas to campaign for him.)*The White House leaks to reporters ...”

“... to this unelected President the power to make holy war. Michael Rogin Paris As the historian David Kennedy has remarked, terrorism is different from, and worse than, war. Wars have aims that might someday be achieved, thus bringing about an end to hostilities, but terrorism has no such aims. The object of terror is terror. Still, our grandchildren will ...”

“... with power divided between controllers, strand editors and regional department heads. Troy Kennedy Martin’s 1985 anti-nuclear six-parter Edge of Darkness was commissioned by the head of serials, Jonathan Powell, produced by the Birmingham regional drama head, Michael Wearing, and scheduled before Martin had finished the scripts. Third, as a result of ...”

“... that had created the European Economic Community (EEC) was plain and, strongly encouraged by the Kennedy administration in Washington, which saw Britain as a useful bridgehead into the Community, Macmillan applied for membership in 1962. Explaining that Britain would be little better than a Trojan horse for American domination of Europe, de Gaulle vetoed the ...”

“... the ‘inheritance of power’ that occurred with Bashar al-Assad’s succession in 2000. But Richard Cromwell seriously tried to liberalise the Protectorate; the army felt threatened and deposed him after nine months. Assad fell ill in 1983 and it seemed for a moment that his younger brother, Rifat, would take over, in what would have been an ...”

“... pet and one-time physicist Akaev – the ‘Jefferson’ of his people for Strobe Talbott, the ‘Kennedy of Central Asia’ for the Clinton regime at large – on whose bald pate a drunken Yeltsin once tapped out a melody with wooden spoons; the second his brutish replacement, the former economic functionary Bakiev. As in Ukraine, but more turbulently, the ...”

“... when he was questioned about Russia in a close but philistine way by the young President Kennedy. Ignatieff puts the most lenient construction on these engagements with power. Describing an exchange between Berlin and the old mandarin George Kennan, he writes that ‘it was a fixed principle of his that so-called élites – intellectual or otherwise ...”

“... in the flats above and below don’t even know there’s been a fire. This was something else.’ Richard Welsh is a senior officer with the London Fire Brigade. His pager went off at 1.18 a.m. ‘Initially they had six machines there,’ he said. ‘Then they asked for eight, and then ten, and then 15, 20, and then 25. I’m hearing that on the way there, so ...”