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“... When​ George H.W. Bush arrived in Washington as vice president in January 1981 he seemed little more than a sideshow to Ronald Reagan, the one-time leading man who had been overwhelmingly elected to the greatest stage in the world. Biography after inconclusive biography would be written about Reagan’s two terms, as their authors tried to square the many gaps in his knowledge with his seemingly acute political instincts and the ease with which he appeared to handle the presidency ...”

“... hall. Spalding observes, justly, that by insisting on the intervention of the American architect John Russell Pope in 1929 the sponsor, Lord Duveen of Millbank, was promoting, against the inclinations of British curators and civil servants, the ‘latest American style’, the style of the new sculpture gallery in the Metropolitan Museum in New York. Pope ...”

“... book Celebrity Caricature in America, the catalogue for an exhibition at the Smithsonian in Washington DC until 23 August, and you will also learn unmistakably to recognise the artist, Miguel Covarrubias. There’s Covarrubias again, putting Jean Harlow on the couch below an elongated, brooding Freud; she appears to be dreaming of cacti, shown outside ...”

“... in Greenwood, a flourishing neighbourhood known as Black Wall Street, a title given by Booker T. Washington, who promoted the idea that racial progress would come through the accumulation of wealth, not political agitation. (Whites, however, referred to Greenwood as ‘Little Africa’.)One of the paradoxical effects of racial segregation was that economic ...”

“... the Canadian National Gallery and the Return of the Prodigal Son in the National Gallery of Art in Washington (the former loaned to the exhibition in New York) – were sold by Soult to the second Duke of Sutherland in 1835, and hung for more than a century in the magnificent gallery of Stafford House (now Lancaster House). Architectural recesses were ...”

“... were projecting a 50 per cent increase in the infant mortality rate. In a later memoir, John Maynard Keynes attributed the prolongation of civilian punishment to a cause inherent in bureaucracy. The blockade had become by that time a very perfect instrument. It had taken four years to create and was Whitehall’s finest achievement; it had evoked ...”

“... stay in Vienna paying handsomely for sessions with Freud. All the while, he kept a flat on Washington Square and supported his estranged wife, Elaine Orr, as well as the child she had with Cummings (at the time Nancy was born, Thayer and Elaine lived separately; they divorced two years later). But Thayer was not entirely at home in the modernist ...”

“... reform in Hong Kong – but it went against the diplomatic grain. Secret missions from London and Washington were creeping to Beijing within months of the massacre. When in 1992 Deng blew the whistle for China’s new race to a sort of capitalism, he became Man of the Year in half a dozen international weeklies. It was an inspired move. The well-connected ...”

“... Voorhees’s study is different. He highlights the all-important fact that in October 1962 John F. Kennedy was about to face congressional midterm elections. The results would determine the fate of his presidency, as well as his prospects for re-election in 1964. Kennedy’s New Frontier domestic agenda – which promised a huge house-building ...”

“... In his memoirs Roy Jenkins describes John Kennedy as the best President of the USA in the past four decades. It is a curious, not to say unfashionable verdict. The demolishers of the Kennedy legend have been carrying all before them in the past few years. So battered is the Kennedy reputation that it is almost time for a new school of revisionist historians to rehabilitate the myth of Camelot on the Potomac ...”

“... nostrils and down into their stomachs. They called this ‘intensified assisted feeding’. Dr John Edmondson, the commander of the US Naval Hospital at Guantánamo at the time, swore an affidavit saying: ‘The actual feeding process, both at the detention hospital and on the cell block, is very voluntary.’ (Edmondson left Guantánamo early in 2006. On ...”

“... historian who, like me, was going through Korea-related documents at the National Archives in Washington. He happened to remark that he sometimes wondered whether the Korean Demilitarised Zone might be ground zero for the end of the world. This April, Kim In-ryong, a North Korean diplomat at the UN, warned of ‘a dangerous situation in which a ...”

“... unaccountable power of banks and other sinister financial interests. Half a century or so after John F. Kennedy’s assassination, around 60 per cent of Americans still dissent from the official verdict that a lone gunman was responsible, though there’s no consensus about the identity of the conspirators: variously the Mafia, the CIA or Castro’s ...”

“... holidaying or not holidaying – ‘not holidaying’ has been the thrill of a lifetime for John Reid – and endorsed by Clinton. All this makes it easy to refuse calls for an inquiry, just as it was after 7 July. The joke is wearing thin. Blair’s second running gag has been to portray himself as a man with profound convictions about the need for ...”

“... about: discussion at high-level meetings is startlingly primitive,’ he wrote in 1995. He left Washington after a year and enjoyed a moment in the limelight during the 1992 campaign, testifying to Congress about income inequality, then was excluded from the Clinton administration by Robert Reich, the leader of the economic transition team whom Krugman had ...”