“... about nuclear weapons co-operation (Donald Maclean was at this time in the British Embassy in Washington). When Kim Philby arrived in Washington in 1949, as the SIS liaison man with American Intelligence, the double-agent ‘Basil’ was able to confirm the suspicions of James Jesus Angleton that Philby was working for ...”

“... by nothing much more than similarities that happen to occur to him. De Gaulle was like George Washington: they both faced hardship and won military victories. We are supposed to be struck by the fact that de Gaulle endured political setbacks by retreating to Colombey-les-Deux-Eglises, while Washington could retreat to ...”

“... will be no one but soldiers and bandits. Jorge Luis Borges, ‘The Garden of Forking Paths’ John Bagot Glubb, a young lieutenant bearing wounds from the war in France, arrived in Mesopotamia in 1920. His assignment was to command armed patrols through the desert of what would become, under its first Western occupier, Iraq. The British bureaucracy, he ...”

“... for International Peace, Harvard’s project on Managing the Atom, and the Stimson Center in Washington. There is no shortage of NGOs involved, among them the US Arms Control Association and the Pugwash conference. Funding comes from governments and from large bodies such as the Ford and MacArthur Foundations, the Ploughshares Fund, the Carnegie ...”

“... round number pulled out of a hat. In the New York Times the PR spokesman identified himself as ‘John Barron’. In the Associated Press story the same publicity man called himself ‘Donald Baron’ and was quoted as saying that ‘the merit of these stones was not great enough to save them.’ Both ‘John’ and ...”

“... of some violent figure such as Senator McCarthy or by some crusading newspaper such as the Washington Post, whether by its own divisions or its neuroticisms. It has at times been rendered almost powerless by the actions of distant states, such as North Vietnam, Iran and Israel (and may well now be adversely affected by events in certain of the smaller ...”

“... country – Churchill most obstinately of all. Guy Burgess was one of those – James Klugmann and John Cornford were the chief – who helped to induct me into the Party. We belonged to the same college, and hence to the same ‘cell’. I remember Burgess as a rather plump, fresh-faced youth, of guileless, almost cherubic expression. I heard him spoken of as ...”

“... in the freedom struggle. The four political assassinations that define the 1960s – those of John and Robert Kennedy, Malcolm X and King – stand in for the very large numbers (almost all black and lost to national public memory) martyred to racial justice. It is now a commonplace that, instead of protecting Southern civil rights workers, the FBI (with ...”

“... elections of the last twenty years. Carter has refused to debate Edward Kennedy, and now John Anderson, and thus Reagan. Reagan in turn has been bound and gagged by his advisers, their hostage rather than their boss, in the apparent belief that he cannot live up to the media pitches devised by them on his behalf. There has hardly, therefore, been ...”

“... champion of boxing in a place where people do nothing but wrestle. Or it’s like trying to get John Wayne or Clint Eastwood to look persuasive in Gone with the Wind. I’m not suggesting that Tarantino doesn’t know what he is doing, and he can certainly get jokes of this clashing kind to work for him. One of the film’s finest moments concerns the Texas ...”

“... white district. He won Schumer’s congressional seat when Schumer ran for the Senate in 1998. In Washington he fell in line, and voted for the invasion of Iraq in 2002. He made a failed bid for the Democratic nomination for New York mayor in 2005, remembered mostly for a neighbourhood sanitation programme called ‘Weiner’s Cleaners’ (the name has now ...”

“... in Europe continued to do well after the war. Nicholas writes that the director of the Tate, John Rothenstein, rushed to Paris with Kenneth Clark in 1944, expecting to find impoverished French collectors and dealers eager to sell pictures at bargain prices. Instead they found (in Clark’s words) ‘a sense of prosperity and social gaiety, which made ...”

“... America and American life struck writers (and others) as being at once too ‘plotless’ (or, as Washington Irving put it – before Cooper, Hawthorne, James and others – too lacking in ‘association’) and ‘stiflingly, even obsessively over-plotted’. There is a relationship, in Fender’s reading of American literature, between plotting and ...”

“... only four months every two years. Of course it was sheer hypocrisy for George W. to run against ‘Washington DC’, given his proximity to power in the Reagan-Bush years (as we know, this hypocrisy is structural to the Right: it loathes the government whose power it covets), but now he has to run ‘Washington DC’. So how ...”

“... of the college.) Burr served with distinction in the revolutionary army, winning a place on George Washington’s staff. Afflicted, like Hamilton, with inordinate ambition, Burr fell out with Washington and seems to have been sympathetic to the Conway Cabal that tried to replace him as military commander with General Horatio ...”