“... a coup d’état. In collaboration with the Clinton wing of the Democratic Party, they fashioned a Washington foreign policy consensus committed to armed intervention abroad, overt or covert, anywhere US intelligence agencies decided that American interests were somehow at stake. What had once been kept hidden was now paraded in public, as doctrines of regime ...”

“... seen by night and day, and amazing silhouettes of people, pumps and scaffolding. It’s as if John Ford had decided to start a western among the California oil rigs, and track his story up the West Coast to Puget Sound. The space around the people in this movie is so large and so unambiguously beautiful you have to wonder what story it is trying to ...”

“... exhibition we meet the equally awkward unfinished marble David from the National Gallery of Art in Washington, ingeniously placed before an opening so we can compare it with the earlier work. Its condition is best explained as a reflection of the ageing artist’s impatience with the character of carving, which allows no revisions. Neither marble has anything ...”

“... by his translation of the Austrian folk tale Bambi, which carried a moist Foreword from John Galsworthy.) This was the literary bridge that carried Chambers from relative hackdom on the Daily Worker to pre-eminence at the Stalinist flagship of letters, The New Masses. Indeed it was his usefulness and ability in this department that got him ...”

“... and tells me ideally she would vote for a bizarre dream-ticket of Bradley and Republican senator John McCain, who both advocate it. But most are straightforwardly undecided between Bradley and the other Democratic contender and favourite, Al Gore. Bradley arrives, six and a half feet tall and ramrod straight. He walks round the room, shaking hands and saying ...”

“... go wrong and absorb more forces ... quote a strong body wanted just to leave it on one side. But John Fieldhouse and I were quite keen to have a go because we thought we could do it and also felt we needed a success. We hadn’t many successes politically. We also needed a success militarily to get Ministers to believe in what are could do because a lot of ...”

“... bore faint traces of the grand manner of the 17th century’, and that the acolyte is evidently St John. All this is a part of the history, the mentalité, of Octave – and so of Yourcenar. These are all fragments peeled from a few dowdy decades in the centuries rolling past Yourcenar’s inward eye. They are so far from everyday conceptions of reality that ...”

“... has to be tested not simply against the views of Assange’s lawyers and helpmates, but those of John Bellinger, for example, a former legal counsel for the State Department, who told AP television news in 2010 that bringing charges against Assange while he was still in the UK would put a loyal ally on the spot by generating a rival extradition ...”

“... she could close America’s political divide’) to the Democratic nomination and then defeating John McCain in the presidential election – he felt he had proved something both about himself and his country. ‘My having been elected president was proof that the American idea endures.’ It’s a big claim. No one else, by implication, could make ...”

“... As John Berryman​ tells it, in a Paris Review interview conducted in 1970, he was walking to a bar in Minneapolis one evening in the mid-1950s with his second wife, Anne, the two of them joking back and forth, when Berryman volunteered that he ‘hated the name Mabel more than any other female name’. Anne decided Henry was the name she found ‘unbearable ...”

“... weapons, a technology the Russians were already pursuing. The first tests convinced both Washington and Moscow that hydrogen bombs were far too powerful for traditional military purposes; purposes were found for them, nonetheless. Eisenhower discovered that nuclear weapons could cut costs: they were cheaper than conventional military ...”

“... on the Democrats for congressional support. Elite leadership of the Republican Party collapsed. John McCain chose the shockingly unqualified Sarah Palin as a running mate in the 2008 election because she was hugely popular with the Republican base, who revelled in the outrage she triggered among liberals. Barack Obama’s victory in that election only ...”

“... briefing, a darling of the paparazzi, as comfortable in a Tehran nightclub as he was at a Washington summit and likely to be photographed attending both. But is showmanship really enough? In a recent essay in the New Yorker, Adam Gopnik described the three sides of Abraham Lincoln’s political personality: Barnum Lincoln, who knew how to put on a ...”

“... rejected a knighthood in 1951). He next set his sights on the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC, courted by its director, John Walker, with plans for a new building and murmurs of favourable tax rates. In 1949 and 1950, Gulbenkian sent a selection of his paintings to ...”

“... and lovable hero of ‘Blind Josef Pronek and Dead Souls’. Pronek, a Bosnian writer, arrives in Washington on a writers’ exchange programme with only a few words of English, and when war breaks out at home finds himself forced to stay. (Sounds familiar?) He takes on a few jobs, finds a part-time girlfriend and lives in an apartment where he and his ...”