“... 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 ...”

“... on the insanity of the war project, because the border is, indeed, very close. Birds fly over it. Washington and London need two hundred thousand armed men, billions of pounds, ton upon ton of explosives and the sky dark with aircraft to do what I could have done that quiet afternoon in the desert, driven a few miles up the road under the big tranquil ...”

“... illiberal, openly racist state, led by a close ally of Donald Trump, is impossible to stomach. As Peter Beinart wrote in 2010, the Jewish establishment asked American Jews to ‘check their liberalism at Zionism’s door’, only to find that ‘many young Jews had checked their Zionism instead.’The conflict that Beinart described is an old one. In ...”

“... the strain. Is there enough inherent strength in ‘the sinews of the Russian state’, to use Peter Reddaway’s phrase, to sustain the free and democratic political life which its leaders advocate, and of which there are some signs? The answers Richard Sakwa and Alexander Yakovlev give to these questions are discouraging, even where they are not meant to ...”

“... and as a boy he served briefly in the revolutionary army, being present at Brandywine and seeing Washington plain. Then, after a few weeks in the United States Navy, he joined a privateer, and after some complicated misadventures in the West Indies, where he was captured, he was entered willy-nilly on the books of His Majesty’s brig St Lucia. In 1782, the ...”

“... He provides the new, as the old, Chronicle with its unforgettable opening tableau in March 1948: Washington D.C. Arriving at the Raleigh Hotel for my appointment with Stravinsky this morning, I find Auden pacing the lobby – in the same suit he wore in a photograph taken a decade ago in China. ‘The night train from Pittsburgh was late,’ he says, ‘and ...”

“... a controversial journalist, taking a strong pro-British line against the pro-French. His pen-name, Peter Porcupine, was famous on both sides of the Atlantic. He became one of the tourist attractions of Philadelphia, remarks George Spater, who does well to tell us so much about the American years – this smart, satirical European journalist provoking the staid ...”

“... Another, more recent antecedent of which Salaman seems to be aware is that of the Australian Peter Carey’s very comparable Bliss (1981), whose ad-man hero Harry Joy revives at the start after being clinically dead for nine minutes, and returns, winded, to his former way of life, deprived of his former breezy ‘optimism’, even suspecting that he is ...”

“... It was not statute which compelled the courts to assist the Tory Government’s suppression of Peter Wright’s allegations in Spycatcher, or to uphold the media ban against Sinn Fein and others holding Republican views. Similar cases can be produced to show an equally creative, and entirely common-law-based, judicial antagonism to the rights of ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”