“... most perfect character in history’, more practical than Saint Louis, holier than George Washington, and kinder than Charlemagne or Edward I. To Alfred were routinely ascribed the beginnings of all the most characteristic and prestigious English institutions: Oxford University (though few can seriously have believed that), the Royal Navy, universal ...”

“... and satisfying menu; but the reader who misses the great names of the period should be warned that Peter Eisenman, Richard Rogers, Alvaro Siza, Jean Nouvel and Rem Koolhaas (along with the central figure in Barcelona’s historic renewal, Oriol Bohigas) are all represented by substantial essays or interviews. I am not sure whether the distribution of these ...”

“... of Ecstasy, a juvenile descendant of the Winged Victory, also closely related to Loie Fuller and Peter Pan, first perched upon the bonnet of a Rolls-Royce. By the Thirties architecture had begun to envy the sleek and aggressive forms employed in modern cars and ocean liners especially. We can see this from the spectacular perspectives hanging on the stairs ...”

“... of the shifts and retractions she comments on.) Several faculty members (including Daniel Bell and Peter Gay) left Columbia because of the student uprising and the generally benign faculty response to it, while the Congress for Cultural Freedom sputtered on for I don’t know how long. Most of the ‘liberal anti-Communists’ of the Fifties and Sixties soon ...”

“... coastal American, you might get a vast informational department store like the New York Times, the Washington Post or the LA Times, but the great cities in between had their equivalents, from the Chicago Tribune to the Arizona Republic. If you were British, you might buy one of this country’s bitterly competitive national counterparts, such as the ...”

“... I was completely and utterly horrified by what I felt was almost a coup.Hammond flew straight to Washington for the annual IMF conference:When I arrived in Washington, it was to discover that the pound was in free fall … I then had to get out on the TV in Washington, to try to ...”

“... by an attempt to divide friend from enemy within the US. Against me, the establishment (‘Washington’); with me, the people – or rather the people who matter. In the new era of globalisation, ‘politicians prospered but the jobs left and the factories closed. The establishment protected itself, but not the citizens of our country. Their victories ...”

“... retrospectively. But for all the similarities, there is an obvious difference: spin doctors in Washington and other Western capitals aren’t armed.It isn’t only the media: the military exercises its power in all areas of Pakistani society. Business executives say that if they needed to get a road built to service a new factory, they used to bribe a ...”

“... bases in Central Asia, and primed the Northern Alliance for Kabul. So eager was Moscow to please Washington that in the emotion of the moment, it even abandoned its listening post in Cuba, of scant relevance to Enduring Freedom in West Asia. But it soon became clear there would be little reward for such gestures. In December 2001, the Bush administration ...”

“... inventory of the planet’s dwindling contents. Projects like the Rapid Assessment Program in Washington or Biotrop (a consortium of American universities) have been scrambled to do just this. As part of the emergency (which ironically includes the demand for final biological information about ourselves, in the form of the human genome sequencing ...”

“... and am astonished when I see on the news in the evening the vast concourse of people gathered in Washington. I don’t read any official estimates of the numbers though it’s to be hoped they estimate more accurately in the US than they do here, where any demonstration of which the police disapprove – the Stop the War marches, for instance – is ...”

“... in Venice in 1546 contained autobiographical material. These documents suggest a personality which Peter Humfrey in his 1997 study of Lotto described as ‘introspective, hypersensitive, often prickly and quick to take offence; but also generous in his affections, tender in his humanity and possessing a quirky sense of humour’. They also make it clear that ...”

“... who could afford it they sent them to America. Lucan and his brother and two sisters arrived in Washington in 1940, returning to London in 1945. That episode, his elder sister Jane Griffin told Thompson, was ‘when it all started’. Griffin, one of the members of the family who sympathised with her parents’ politics, has long made her home in New ...”

“... In 1961, too, Goffman published Asylums, the fruit of his research at St Elizabeth’s Hospital in Washington DC, a vast mental institution with more than seven thousand patients. His study of ‘inmate culture’ and ‘the inmate world’ drew parallels with prisons, conscript armies and concentration camps. Inmates became, in Goffman’s enduring ...”

“... as an agent in the mid-1950s, representing the interests of Humphrey Bogart, Barbara Stanwyck, Peter Lorre, Mary Astor, Joseph Cotten and many lesser lights in the studio firmament. Those of us who knew Clancy – he died in July 2017 in Los Angeles at the age of ninety – can attest that he was a tummler of note, a real-life Zelig who found himself with ...”