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“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... including Ford and Reagan, have been Masons. The dollar bill bears not only the likeness of George Washington, who was initiated into Masonry in 1752, but the all-seeing eye, its symbol. Yet the precise nature of the Masonic bonds, the rituals exacted of its members, and indeed the very origins of the society, remain remarkably little explored. It was ...”

“... became private secretary to Lloyd George in the First World War, and the British Ambassador in Washington in the Second; Robert Brand, thought by Jan Smuts to be ‘the most outstanding member of a very able team’ in South Africa, who became an investment banker and remained easily the best of the set; Geoffrey Dawson, editor of the Times for 26 ...”

“... which pits the hero against a wing of the FBI with near-double-O dispensation, as well as a Washington super-lawyer, the pistol-packing Supreme Court judge, an arms-smuggling, ex-CIA villain and a small platoon of hit-men – turns on an elaborate chess riddle in which the black pieces stand for black men and the white pieces for white men. The riddle ...”

“... but a guy liked to have good hair. Then some magic descended on him, and the magician was John Huston, who wrote the script for High Sierra (1941). It’s the story of a veteran gangster, Roy Earle, who wants peace and a new life. But as he comes out of prison, the girl he likes dumps him and he’s on the hook for one more job. Huston saw him ...”