“... political involvement. Early in 1917, he was chosen by the Government of Aristide Briand to go to Washington and represent the case to the President for an American intervention in the European war. Bergson was to ask for credits, as well as for armies, and to reassure the eirenic Wilson that what the French wanted was nothing more vindictive than ‘peace ...”

“... exist as investment banks. On 25 September came the largest bank failure in American history, as Washington Mutual went into receivership following a bank run during which its customers withdrew $16.7 billion in ten days. Taking all these superlatives together, it’s easy to see why the Federal Reserve and the US Treasury (run by Hank Paulson, former head ...”

“... saved by the Korean War, which made the survival of ‘Free China’ a Cold War imperative for Washington. The Kuomintang gained a new lease of life, but because it relied on the pretence that nothing had changed – it still represented China in the UN – it was closer to a living death. The people of Taiwan exchanged Japanese rule for another oppressive ...”

“... magazine is as good as this one it hurts to throw old copies away. Visiting I.F. Stone once in Washington, I was impressed by his complete bound files of the New York Review of Books, and more impressed still that he had extracted these from the editor as part-payment. Perhaps contributors to the LRB could work the same trick on Karl Miller, who for this ...”

“... the ambiguities and resorts to conventional wisdom. His list of leaders includes Harry Truman and John Kennedy – two presidents who risked war by exacerbating tensions with the Soviet Union. Dallek views FDR from the perspective of a mid-century liberal who has apparently made his peace with the warfare state. As Dallek sees him, FDR, like his cousin ...”

“... aftermath of World War Two, mainstream Jewish organisations closely monitored signals coming from Washington and adjusted to them. Indeed, it seems that the AJC supported the founding of Israel mainly from fear that a domestic backlash might ensue if the Jewish displaced persons in Europe were not quickly settled. From early on, these organisations harboured ...”

“... power to tough-minded scrutiny of it. In 1999, during Nato’s bombing of Yugoslavia, Moyn went to Washington DC to work as an intern on Clinton’s National Security Council. Today, he is a prominent presence in the intellectual culture of the American left, which, denied representation by a mainstream media busy execrating Trump and boosting Never ...”

“... We were, I later discovered, driving our way through a book I hadn’t read at the time: John Steinbeck’s Travels with Charley, wherein the author and his dog, Charley, lit out on the back roads of America in the fall of 1960, in a new GM pickup, in order to ‘rediscover this monster land’. Steinbeck is precise and prescient about ...”

“... into terrible atrocities. My Lai happened because officers failed.’ Another Marine, Captain John McNamara, wrote home in 1967 that he was appalled by the loose talk he heard among his fellow officers about the need to employ terrorist tactics against terrorists: ‘Just a few years ago it was confined to the fringe. If the actual [US ...”

“... journalist Joseph Alsop they formed a Three of Hearts in the less fastidious quarters of Washington DC. Another player made up an occasional fourth man. Isaiah Berlin was happy, at least when Charles (Chip) Bohlen was unavailable, to furnish an urbane ditto to their ruthlessness. Almost as if to show that academics and intellectuals may be tough ...”

“... he’s recently made with the government to turn the old post office on Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington DC into a hotel. He had been chosen by the government over the owners of Hyatt, major donors to Obama, because of his superior negotiating skills. If he had a flaw, his father used to tell him, it was that he was too tough: ‘Be a little like Jeb Bush ...”

“... he set out. What seemed false had become true.Qā’sElid had inadvertently become what Malcolm John Rebennack Jr, in his first work as Dr John, billed as the ‘last of the best’:They call me the gris-gris manGot many clients, come from miles around,Running down my prescriptionI got medicine to cure all y’alls ills,I ...”

“... in fact, been well represented throughout the conference – in covert and unforeseen ways.’ Washington funded a number of political and cultural organisations, with the aim of keeping African nations out of Moscow’s sphere of influence. The Africa-America Institute, for example, which sent Horace Mann Bond (president of Nkrumah’s alma mater, Lincoln ...”

“... crossed the thinning picket lines of Catholic War Veterans to watch the film in a cinema in Washington DC. The blacklist, at least in principle, was broken. So Trumbo entered Hollywood legend as ‘The Man who Broke the Blacklist’. As Pauline Kael put it, he became ‘the leading exponent of the dictates-of-conscience and the ...”

“... nuclear weapons and for launching reconnaissance flights during the Cuban Missile Crisis.Neither Washington nor London saw any reason to end intelligence co-operation at the end of the war. Besides, the US had bigger plans. The UKUSA Agreement – the official name of the Five Eyes founding document – was drafted as a permanent replacement for BRUSA in ...”