“... Athos peninsula, when he looks up and sees the first Sputnik coursing across the sky. When J.F. Kennedy assumes the US Presidency in 1961, Lindqvist is studying in Peking, living near Communist Party HQ, and only vaguely aware of the numerous US hydrogen bombs then targeted on him. In 1964, his wife is pregnant and his dissertation in comparative literature ...”

“... who warmly sympathised with Hitler’s politics. (How many of these people also know that John F. Kennedy was an early supporter of America First?) But the underlying question was not whether Trump was giving a secret signal to anti-Semites – among his biggest supporters are the prime minister of Israel and the mayor of Jerusalem – but rather what he ...”

“... mysterious. But it surely cries out for more commentary when Didion recalls that as the deaths of Kennedy and Lee Oswald were being shown on television, Eduene remarked: Well, Oswald and Ruby had ‘every right’ to do as they did. That is an alarming mother to be uncertain of. That is more than being right of centre. That is something like giving up the ...”

“... to see the tender and constant feelings which Fanny Price in Mansfield Park has for her brother William, also away at sea, as being a fundamental part of Austen’s emotional world. The novel begins by breaking a family, by taking Fanny from her own impoverished family and handing her over, almost as a changeling, to the care of her two aunts. The fact that ...”

“... the end of the Cold War’, as Robert Kagan, a former State Department official under Reagan, and William Kristol, editor of the Weekly Standard, wrote in an essay collection called Present Dangers: Crisis and Opportunity in American Foreign and Defence Policy, published in 2000, the election year. Present Dangers was an ur-text of neoconservative ...”

“... The Color of Truth*, the American scholar Kai Bird presents his study of McGeorge (‘Mac’) and William Bundy. These were the two dynastic technocrats who organised and justified the hideous war in Vietnam. Cold War liberals themselves, with the kept conservative journalist Joseph Alsop they formed a Three of Hearts in the less fastidious quarters of ...”

“... what was described as an ‘action group’ on Syria, comprising Hillary Clinton, Sergei Lavrov, William Hague and a representative of the Chinese government, was held at Annan’s invitation in Geneva (the meeting is known as ‘Geneva I’). During the meeting Annan issued a communiqué announcing that the action group had agreed on the need for a ...”

“... Remember the images of Angelina Jolie walking across the stage, hand outstretched to greet William Hague at their ‘summit’ on rape as a war crime in London in 2014? It struck me then that she was being offered as a trade-off or collateral damage in the effort to bring such violence to an end. The initiative is now seen as a costly failure; the ...”

“... against the concealment and silence that the loss of Palestine had imposed, and that his father, William Said, had accepted, leaving behind not only the family’s past in Jerusalem but also his Arab name, Wadie. After 1967, Said embraced the Palestinian struggle – an act of ‘affiliation’, as he put it, a commitment based on belief, rather than ...”

“... and for ‘unconstitutional’ searches. In a devastating profile for the New Yorker in 2009, William Finnegan showed that whatever the sheriff had spared the taxpayer by serving inedible food to inmates, it was nothing beside the millions demanded by the courts as compensation for violent deaths in his custody. Pearce was once chief deputy sheriff under ...”

“... decorated by de Gaulle. Not long after his coronation he was welcomed in Washington by President Kennedy; France, for its part, had high hopes that he would manage its postcolonial interests in the Maghreb – he was known to be astute and an implacable adversary.He had been on the throne a little more than two years when Moumen Diouri, a revolutionary ...”

“... children, were elaborate cakes and the latest iPhone.She was fond of a quote she’d found from William Golding. ‘I think women are foolish to pretend they are equal to men,’ it said. ‘They are far superior and always have been.’ Most of the women thought this was a bit untrue, but Rania was very much herself. When her brother-in-law Tariq became ...”