“... twenty years, overseeing Marshall Aid, nurturing the European Economic Community and brokering the Kennedy round of tariff agreements, and he died in harness, at the age of 66, after addressing a committee of the Economic Community in Brussels. But he was not a typical French mandarin. He was Russian by birth and went on to study philosophy and religion in ...”

“... black and white photographs that line the walls of the dining-room: Harold Wilson, Derek Nimmo, David Steel, Jeremy Irons, Clement Freud, Norman Tebbit, Barbara Castle, Elaine Paige, Cecil Parkinson, Nigel Lawson, Robin Day. It’s like being compulsorily inducted into a dinner party from hell, a nightmare mix of half-forgotten careerists and political ...”

“... by private consultants they plan to remake Afghanistan in much the way their forebears in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations sought to forge a new Vietnam alongside the backroom boys from the Rand Corporation. As in Vietnam, indigenous resistance to the American project is hindering its realisation. Security is an obsession, the precondition for ...”

“... he ghosted his autobiography? To what extent did Ted Sorensen create the verbal manner of John F. Kennedy when he wrote Profiles in Courage, a book for which the future president won the Pulitzer Prize? And are the science fiction stories H.P. Lovecraft ghosted for Harry Houdini not the best things he ever wrote? There would be a touch of all this in the ...”

“... security service, a sort of Western Cheka, and Angleton actually got him an interview with Bobby Kennedy so that he could put in his request for $30 million to set up such an organisation. He was bitterly disappointed when the ambition wasn’t realised. In the end, Golitsyn did so much harm to Western intelligence services that an inquiry was held – to ...”

“... siblings of Paul Gosar, Republican congressman from Arizona, endorse his Democratic opponent, Dr David Brill. In response, Gosar tweets: ‘Like leftists everywhere, they put political ideology before family. Stalin would be proud.’ (Gosar, a former dentist, is notable for his belief that neo-Nazi groups are funded by George Soros, a Jewish Holocaust ...”

“... Soviet naval base, before abruptly reversing gears, taking a series of sabbaticals in the Harvard Kennedy School (which would become the finishing school of Singapore’s elite bureaucrats), before embarking on a headlong courtship of US corporations. For the first thirty years of independence, American firms concentrated their domicile-holding companies in ...”

“... perspective: a slideshow-like process, as mechanical as inserting Forrest Gump beside Kennedy at the White House. As Wood points out, the maximalist fetishisation of history is actually anti-historic: the maximalist novel ‘carries within itself, in its calm profusion of characters and plots, its flawless carpet of fine prose on page after ...”

“... a dizzying subplot, he also involved himself intimately in the quarrel between Chaim Weizmann and David Ben-Gurion over the project of a Jewish National Home, and in the attempts by both to play off the British against the Americans. And, though he showed himself able to take risks in leaking classified material that favoured the Zionist cause, he also found ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... it was vital to have a reliable locum in Cyprus. Visiting Washington in 1962, Makarios was told by Kennedy that he should form his own party, on the right, to check the alarming popularity of AKEL, and should desist from unnecessarily correct relations with the USSR. After the archbishop politely declined, saying he did not want to divide his flock, he became ...”

“... waving cushions and towels, and some were leaning out. It happened that one of the firefighters, David Badillo, knew two of the uncles, Carlos and Manfred Ruiz, from the sports centre – they had all worked there as lifeguards – and Melanie gave Badillo her keys to their flat, 176 on the 20th floor. (They still hadn’t heard from Jessica.) Badillo went ...”