“... I was airborne for War Zone C (‘no shows’, it was said, were listed on a giant computer in Washington and never flew by US Army helicopter again), following the winding Saigon River. Twenty minutes later door gunners on either side cocked their weapons as our helicopter dived to just above treetop height. I glimpsed scrub, dug-up dirt ...”

“... First Family might constitute an offence against the ethos of the republic. Although only John F. Kennedy held the presidency, there were several attempts to restore the family to the office. JFK’s brother Robert was assassinated after his victory in the California Democratic primary in 1968. The immediate chances of a third brother, Senator Edward ...”

“... Mrs Clinton changed her hair about four times a day, often with the direct encouragement of the Washington Post in collusion with Womenswear Daily. But now, it seems, Hillary has ditched the up-do, the bouncing bob, the scrape-back and the Arkanfro, and has settled for a traditional, rock-solid, Oval Office quiff, the kind of hairstyle that looks like it ...”

“... functions which, in the United States, were divided up between Boston, New York, Philadelphia and Washington, and in France were shared by Paris, Versailles, Lyons, Marseilles and Bordeaux. So, as Henry James explained, ‘one has not the alternative of speaking of London as a whole, for the simple reason that there is no whole of it ... Rather, it is a ...”

“... in Action. Entirely absent, or mentioned only in passing, are Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, John Yoo, Elliott Abrams, Ahmed Chalabi, Ayad Allawi, Rick Santorum, Trent Lott, Tom DeLay, Richard Armitage, Katherine Harris, Ken Mehlman, Paul O’Neill, Rush Limbaugh. Barely appearing at all are John Ashcroft, Samuel ...”

“... The Iraq Inquiry​ , chaired by Sir John Chilcot and composed of five privy councillors, finally published its report on the morning of 6 July, seven years and 21 days after it was established by Gordon Brown with a remit to ‘look at the run-up to the conflict, the conflict itself and the reconstruction, so that we can learn lessons ...”

“... This idea of Wolfenden as a wash-out and the squanderer of a prodigious talent persuaded John Carey, one of his Oxford contemporaries, to find him ‘the least interesting’ of Faulks’s subjects. Not only does Carey challenge Faulks’s claim that ‘in some minor way he represented a generation’: he suggests he was ‘bizarrely ...”

“... and sentenced in Florida; while committing his crimes Bundy also wrote a rape crisis manual for Washington state.) For the character of Lecter, however, Harris manages an even better thing than doing his homework: he simply ignores it. Lecter is straightforwardly a monster, bearing no relation to any murderer who ever lived, but achieving an archetypal ...”

“... very fast. He is 31 years old, and has been in full-time business three years. He was born in Washington DC, the offspring of ‘liberal’ parents: his father, as Matt recalls, was ‘one of those guys who wore Nixon masks in parades’. His mother campaigned for Clinton during the Primaries, although now she listens to Rush Limbaugh. Drudge himself is ...”

“... and women with equal ease. He was upset when a special comrade of long standing, Peter Doyle, a Washington streetcar conductor, drifted apart from him in the Seventies, when he was growing an old man; but Doyle was nearly thirty years younger and had his own life to live, as Whitman was the first to recognise. To a young English widow, Mrs Gilchrist, who ...”

“... 1990 and, on ‘Earth Day’ later that year, Smith announced to incredulous journalists at the Washington Press Club that GM would have a viable production model of the electric car ready to roll in three years. CARB took Smith at his word, and issued its 1990 ‘mandate’. The Board decreed that, by 1998, Detroit’s big three and Japan’s big four ...”

“... he died (now, after years in the conservation studio, back on display in the National Gallery, Washington). It is illustrated in colour in Goffen’s book; there is a detail, as well, showing how worn and damaged the painting is, but also how many exquisite passages remain. Hair is no longer conceived of as finely-fashioned wire, but as soft and flowing ...”

“... cultural ascendancy was beginning. These artists – George Luks, Everett Shinn, William Glackens, John Sloan and George Bellows – had all (Bellows apart) started out in the 1890s as newspaper sketch-artists in Philadelphia. Drawn together by the magnetic preaching of Robert Henri, a slightly older painter who had returned from art school in Paris to his ...”

“... Center has gone, and that others might be coloured by the emergence of the anthrax threat and John Ashcroft’s rise to power. It must have been tempting to introduce a phoney topicality, but with ‘so much fresh outrageousness being manufactured daily’, Franzen allowed himself only ‘minimal tinkering’. For Foden, the difficulties were more ...”

“... rolling, its farmland is welcoming, its mountains aren’t steep enough to be awe inspiring. Even Washington Irving’s famous Headless Horseman is swaddled by the name of his home in Sleepy Hollow. Roughly an hour or two from New York City, depending on how deeply scenic you want your trip to be, the Hudson Valley feels like a reassuring antidote to the ...”