“... 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 ...”

“... Stevens was depicted by earlier historians as ‘the crippled, fanatical personification’, in John F. Kennedy’s words, ‘of the extremes of the Radical Republican movement’. Today, he is admired for his fierce commitment to racial equality, which long preceded the Civil War. As a delegate to the 1837 Pennsylvania constitutional convention, Stevens ...”

“... Susan Carruthers sets out to explore the long and surprisingly complicated story of the ‘Dear John’ break-up letter sent by American women to US troops serving overseas. But her account offers insights into a broader entanglement, involving the militarism that shores up modern nationhood; the emotional and sexual ties that sustain and can destroy men in ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Protestantism that had made too many compromises with the modern world. More than a decade later John Gray, disillusioned with Thatcherism, proposed post-liberalism as a new path; more important, the English Anglican (leaning heavily Anglo-Catholic) John Milbank radicalised the theological project, breaking with liberal ...”

“... 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 ...”