“... about Russia and China, and hasn’t adjusted his stance on Syria to the fact both countries share Washington’s anxiety about the spread of terrorism in and beyond Syria; like Washington, they believe that Islamic State must be stopped. The military’s resistance dates back to the summer of 2013, when a highly classified ...”

“... before the committee’. Almost all the Republicans in Congress, with the distinct exception of John McCain, opposed the publication of the findings, and their highest card was the absence of testimony by agents. Yet written materials of sufficient quantity and authority may have a credibility that only the most reliable of witnesses could claim. The ...”

“... chief of naval intelligence, Lieutenant Commander Fleming undertook a secret mission to Washington in May 1941. He was ‘whisked off to a room in the new annexe of the embassy, locked in with a pen and paper and the necessities of life’, a colleague recalled, and there he wrote, ‘under armed guard around the clock, a document of some seventy ...”

“... the whodunnit in which the puzzle apparently remains unsolved. Did O’Brien’s protagonist, John Wade, murder his wife? Or not? And what happens to Wade himself? O’Brien does not tell you – at least not directly. The conundrum has so confounded most American reviewers that, after a few lines detailing the primary components of the central plot ...”

“... Bill, where he studied English and edited the Daily Bruin (Watergate conspirators Bob Haldeman and John Ehrlichman were his arch-enemies on the paper). By then, he’d already been part of the Allied occupation of Germany pulling bodies out of the rubble, gone AWOL to attend the Nuremberg Trials (with the intention of assassinating Hermann Göring) and worked ...”

“... through the marbled halls. ‘Koreagate’, on the other hand, was a lame effort to define the Washington influence-peddling of the arms-dealer Tongsun Park. The brittle and amoral wits of the new Post-Modern New Republic actually ran a competition to summarise the bewildering complexity of the Iran-Contra affair, and got gates galore. Since Oliver North ...”

“... flowers to the wire fencing around the Rose and the Globe, had a familiar whiff.Andrew Gurr and John Orrell’s Rebuilding Shakespeare’s Globe concerns a project conceived well before the recent discoveries. But its primary aim – to present the case for a ‘reconstruction’ of the Globe Theatre in Southwark near the site of the original – might well ...”

“... internationalised by its authors. The narrative of The Devil’s Alternative shuttles between Washington, London, Moscow and Holland. Understandable indulgence is shown by these British authors to non-British readers. Forsyth, for example, will routinely insert parenthetic guide-book material for the ignorant, but commercially valued, foreigner: ‘At ...”

“... the born of this world are marked from the get-out, win or lose.’ Kingsolver herself lives in Washington County, close to where the novel is set. Her sense of place is evident in the rhythms of the narrator’s idiolect. She gives Demon a demotic, phrase-making voice that has been influenced by the carefully contrived informality of Dickens’s ...”

“... cynical politicians who don’t see support of ‘queer theory and semiotics in the poetry of John Clare’ as a big vote-winner with the folks back home in Kansas. That is one reason why, as long ago as 1962, W.H. Auden said: ‘When I find myself in the company of scientists, I feel like a shabby curate who has strayed by mistake into a drawing room ...”

“... load.Or does it explode?Hughes was not himself prone to explosive behaviour, even when summoned to Washington to account for his radical past by Joe McCarthy, and taunted and grilled by Roy Cohn, McCarthy’s chief counsel, in March 1953. The transcripts of those sessions, declassified in 2003, present a battle of wits, as Hughes ducks or deflects or refutes ...”

“... retaliated on 6 January by appointing Robert McElroy as cardinal archbishop of Washington DC. In 2015, when McElroy, who supported Francis’s stance against injustice and social inequality, was appointed bishop of San Diego, he spoke out against homelessness and expressed his support for immigration reform. While his fellow American ...”

“... and he wasn’t the only violent misogynist at large on the island. There was her former classmate John Stickney, a bomb enthusiast who blew himself up while stalking his ex-girlfriend. There was her near neighbour, George Waterfield Russell Jr, aka the Eastside Killer, who was apprenticing as a prowler and peeping Tom during the same period, before killing ...”

“... mixing ‘Marxism, narcissism and paganism’, a realisation of the ‘dystopian fantasy of John Lennon’. Talk of ‘white culture’ under threat lit up social media. Commentators wondered if a radical right-wing vision of politics defined by ‘faith, family and flag’ was taking root in the UK. By then, I was long gone. The press officer came ...”

“... Rayburn was adamantly opposed to the idea after what he’d seen happen to another Texan titan, John Nance Garner, who had traded his power as speaker of the House to become FDR’s running mate in 1932. Eight years later Garner went back to Texas a bitter man, to eke out his days as a pecan farmer; the vice-presidency had broken him. (It was Garner who ...”