“... as one of the brittle porcelain-doll Ladies Who Charity Lunch.Kelley also quotes a 1979 Washington Star editorial on Sinatra, dizzy with its own mock perplexity: ‘That such beautiful music should emerge from such vulgarity is one of the great mysteries of the age.’ Again, just a hint of class sneer: how dare this nouveau riche non-Wasp possess a ...”

“... was the ideal form of American self-expression. This conviction carried him to art schools in Washington DC, Boston and Philadelphia, and briefly to Europe, on a failed odyssey to train under Oskar Kokoschka. Once he realised paintings could move, he made his first short, Six Men Getting Sick (Six Times), and then The Alphabet, which earned him a spot at ...”

“... and (it now emerges), against the advice of its officials stationed in Harare, its head office in Washington decided Zimbabwe merited more huge loans. The Harare Government took all the cash on offer and, since then, has had to do what the Bank wants. The Bank crucially fails to recognise that its policies don’t work unless the recipient government believes ...”

“... loop, dropped by a couple of times a month with news about the agent David Obst or the director Peter Bogdanovich, both dying to do Mallory. He drank bourbon, and when his glass was empty he held it high and rattled the ice cubes for a refill. He stayed until the bottle was empty and it was time to find another roost. He made nightly rounds of the city like ...”

“... European Parliament and by their national governments in the European Council. Rather, as the late Peter Mair insistently pointed out, the problem is that it is impossible to identify anything like a ‘legitimate opposition’. The European Parliament has plenty of parties that do not so much provide opposition in the EU as to the EU – but it is not the ...”

“... were in America with Beyond the Fringe, the first hint of trouble coming when the show was playing Washington. Some of the younger members of the Kennedy administration took us along to the press conference at the White House when the existence of the launch sites was first revealed. I remember nothing of that, struck only by how glamorous Kennedy was, how ...”

“... its president receives a salary worth $400,000, plus many allowances; the chief justice in Washington a measly $277,000. Its origins date back to the first stage of integration: the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC) born of the Schuman Plan was endowed with a Court of Justice that was rolled forward into the European Economic Community set up by ...”

“... opposition. (This advantage was to be rammed home the following year when Kinnock paid a trip to Washington and Reagan’s team humiliated him – allocating him just 25 minutes of the president’s time and then ending the meeting five minutes early – to keep Maggie sweet.) Thatcher secured an invitation to Camp David, where she intended to remind Reagan ...”

“... with actors. There are magnificent performances in his movies – by George C. Scott, James Mason, Peter Sellers, George Macready, Kirk Douglas, Nicole Kidman, Sterling Hayden; and in smaller roles, Slim Pickens, Peter Ustinov, Sue Lyon, Leonard Rossiter, Shelley Winters, Sydney Pollack – but there is never a trace of ...”

“... was part-nationalised in 1975 – and several banks have been as good as nationalised this year. Peter Mandelson recently said that the £2.3 billion in loan guarantees he unlocked for the car industry were no ‘bail-out’, being intended to promote its ‘greening’, but this was just a fancy way of getting access to £1.3 billion from the European ...”

“... Terribly strange. Then finally of course it turned out he wasn’t H. Green at all. His name was Peter Wilson. I was quite put out. In 1960, when he sends the Kennedys a congratulatory telegram, he gets a reply from Jackie, ‘who said that at first they thought it was from Harry Truman until they realised a) Harry wasn’t in Switzerland and b) wouldn’t ...”

“... could use the American military to promote its values. The subtitle of The Good Fight (2006) by Peter Beinart, the then editor of the New Republic, insisted ‘Why Liberals – and Only Liberals – Can Win the War on Terror and Make America Great Again’. ‘It’s time to think of torture,’ Newsweek declared a few weeks after 9/11. ‘Focused ...”

“... beginning in 1873 when, after suffering the first of two paralytic strokes, he had moved from Washington to live with and be cared for in the Camden home of his brother George and his wife Louisa. These years also marked the death of his favourite sister-in-law, Jeffe’s wife Mattie, and the devastating blow of his mother’s death. ‘The only ...”

“... he can appoint and dismiss the trustees. When speaking to the Federal Communications Commission in Washington, he has tended to stress his control of the trust, because this emphasises that his assets are – since he became an American citizen in 1985 – American-owned. At the same time, when speaking to the Securities and Exchange Commission in New ...”

“... cutting short the economy’s downward spiral of 2001, restoring stability at least temporarily. Washington hopes that consumer spending will hold up long enough for corporations to work off their excess capacity. But the worry is that the overhang of plant and equipment will continue to forestall further capital investment, and that consumer spending will ...”