“... of plants and animals, including humans, altering our genes and causing cancer. As she wrote to William Shawn, her editor at the New Yorker, where her book was serialised before its publication, ‘I have a comforting feeling that what I shall now be able to achieve is a synthesis of widely scattered facts, that have not heretofore been considered in ...”

“... it up, just go out there and kill Soviets.’ These orders came from a most peculiar American. William Casey, the CIA’s director from January 1981 to January 1987, was a Catholic Knight of Malta educated by Jesuits. Statues of the Virgin Mary filled his mansion, called ‘Maryknoll’, on Long Island. He attended mass daily and urged Christianity on ...”

“... Service was created; when welfare projects like Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society, which promised cash benefits for all families in need, were launched; and when civil rights legislation was introduced with one nervous eye on Soviet propagandists, who tirelessly and irrefutably pointed to the organised degradation of African Americans in the US.Such small ...”

“... Diplomats from George Kennan to Jack Matlock (Reagan’s ambassador to the Soviet Union) and William Burns (later head of the CIA under Biden) all warned against extending Nato eastwards. They predicted that the siting of potential adversaries – perhaps eventually nuclear-armed ones – along its border would exacerbate Russia’s fears of encirclement ...”

“... to YouTube to revisit the recent royal wedding, and the communal singing of a peculiar poem by William Blake that has gained national anthem status. It was not much thought of until it acquired a splendid musical setting, an inspired piece of bombast by Sir Hubert Parry; ever since, the English have much enjoyed noisily pledging that they will not cease ...”

“... GPS to unearth any connections between Trump and Russia. The assignment involved the payment of ‘cash for trash’, as the Clinton campaign liked to say. Fusion GPS eventually produced the trash, a lurid account written by the former British MI6 intelligence agent Christopher Steele, based on hearsay purchased from anonymous Russian sources. Amid prostitutes ...”

“... law, this debt need not be repaid. Yet in order to meet the renewed demands of the IDB, the cash-strapped Haitian government was required to pay ever-expanding arrears on its debts, many of them linked to loans paid out to the Duvalier dictatorship and to the military regimes that ruled Haiti with great brutality from 1986 to 1990. In July 2003, Haiti ...”

“... lacing and a short tongue. How did Esmond pay for the brogues? It wasn’t a question of cash, though he wasn’t particularly flush, because all shoes were an extravagance in the immediate postwar period, when rationing was at its most stringent: a mingy 24 coupons a year were allowed for clothing, compared to 66 during the war itself; the ticket ...”

“... memories of the Nuremberg Trials by envisioning a future in which figures like Cardinal Ratzinger, William F. Buckley Jr and Jesse Helms would be held to account for the hatefulness of their pronouncements about people with Aids. ACT UP New York was founded in March 1987, but perhaps sparked as much as founded, thanks to the now-or-never rhetoric of the ...”

“... was there, the idea was to knock the whole thing down and start again, using central government cash and private sponsorship.The best-known of the schools built as part of New Labour’s ‘Academies’ programme is Mossbourne Community Academy, less than a mile away from City, which was built on the site of Hackney Downs School. A grammar school turned ...”

“... a literary brilliance’, Pacino writes, and introduced him to many writers, such as William Carlos Williams. This was the late 1950s, and Pacino says he would often go to an automat with a book and make a single cup of coffee last for hours. Laughton also encouraged him in his Shakespearean ambitions: Pacino’s audition piece was ‘O, what a ...”

“... moment of bipartisanship: in the 50-year history of the NHS, there hasn’t been another like it. William Beveridge’s 300-page report, Social Insurance and Allied Service, was submitted in November 1942. By the end of 1944, it had sold over 200,000 copies. It had been commissioned with postwar reconstruction in mind and was to lead to one of this ...”

“... who all graduated in the same year’, it answered ‘chic’, not ‘class’. Still, its cash score at the end of the two-day contest was more than three times higher than that of the best of its human opponents. ‘Quiz-show contestant may be the first job made redundant by Watson,’ one of the vanquished men said, ‘but I’m sure it won’t be ...”

“... of the North of England in the 1930s. But badgering chancellors to flood the economy with cash was no substitute for a carefully targeted policy to revive the decayed industrial estuaries of the Tyne, the Tees, the Mersey and the Clyde; sending Lord Hailsham up to the North-East in a cloth cap was an embarrassing afterthought, which only drew ...”

“... for the Tory leadership in 2005. He also recounts a testy cabinet meeting at which Gove and William Hague clashed about the government’s response to the Arab Spring – Gove wanting to take the side of freedom, Hague preferring caution. What struck Cameron wasn’t the argument but the fact that it made it into the next day’s papers, ‘something ...”