“... Across the start of Eastward Hoe, the very funny city comedy by George Chapman, Ben Jonson and John Marston, she wrote ‘prity one’, then crossed it out, substituting: ‘a resnabell prity one’.In her will Wolfreston bequeathed her books to her son Stanford, on the condition that ‘he shall carefully keepe them together,’ which he seems to have ...”

“... to Nobby’s and drink nickel draft beers. As a flaneur at the café he ‘read everyone, from John Fante to Aldous Huxley to Lao-tzu. My favourite novel at the time was Charles Bukowski’s Post Office, about a down-and-out barfly – a bleak omen, in retrospect, of where my life would one day land.’ (The epigraph of Beautiful Things is a few lines from ...”

“... Historical Society, an organisation of plane spotters and photographers.) Dana Priest of the Washington Post describes spotters as people who stand ‘at the end of runways with high-powered binoculars and cameras to record the flights of military and private aircraft’, but there is more to spotting than just collecting raw information. Watching planes ...”

“... Kennedy, a fabulously successful self-made father with connections in Hollywood, Wall Street, Washington and London, and by Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy, a devout but fashionable Catholic mum, as at home on the golf links or the ski slopes as in Windsor Castle. After making millions in banking, real estate and film distribution, the father wants to devote his ...”

“... In the interval Warner heard that Roosevelt had had a change of heart. French expatriates in Washington, notably the poet Saint-John Perse, talked down De Gaulle; Washington’s envoy to Vichy, Robert Murphy, briefed hard against him; but perhaps the president drew his own ...”

“... much what Hitchens has become. Both these books are essentially the product of his residence in Washington, a transplantation which has served him very well and not merely because brashness is a necessary virtue there. He writes well, is extremely witty, and while he may or may not still be a Marxist, he certainly enjoys an opinionatedly radical ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”