“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... and Japan combined. Yet in political terms such magnitudes continue to be virtual reality. Beside Washington or Tokyo, Brussels remains a cipher. The Union is not equivalent to either the United States or Japan, since it is not a sovereign state. But what kind of formation is it? Most Europeans themselves are at a loss for an answer. The Union remains a more ...”

“... the Beat scene and later became a boozy guru to the hippies. In 1967, during an anti-war march in Washington, he advised Ed Sanders and Allen Ginsberg on their ambitious scheme to exorcise the Pentagon. If they really hoped to levitate the building – and they did – Smith suggested they would need a live cow, painted with magical symbols. It was a long ...”

“... and intelligence analysts. From early on, Palantir had some of the biggest lobbying firms in Washington working on its behalf, as well as well-connected political insiders: Reagan’s national security adviser John Poindexter, the Clinton strategist James Carville and, later, the disgraced general Mike Flynn, who was ...”

“... war’ endured by Mozambique was orchestrated and financed by South Africa. Pretoria and Washington bear most of the blame for the 20-year conflict in Angola. But the holocaust in Portuguese East Timor, half a small island off the northern coast of Australia, was the doing of the Indonesian dictatorship of former general Suharto – with crucial ...”

“... At around 3.30 a.m. on Wednesday, 4 November 2020 (which was 10.30 p.m. on Tuesday, 3 November in Washington DC) it looked as if it was happening a third time. Trump was going to win Florida, despite the millions of dollars spent there by Michael Bloomberg, and he was storming ahead of his 2016 numbers in Ohio. The other swing states were closer, but they ...”

“... possible. Shockley worked out first the theory of semiconduction, and then set his colleagues John Bardeen and Walter Brattain to work on a practical device to manipulate electrical current on a semiconductor. On 23 December 1947 they demonstrated the first working transistor. That invention won the three men the Nobel Prize for physics in 1956.Shockley ...”

“... prosecution, never existed. The four men, three arms-dealers called Michael Aspin, Eric Matson and John Taylor and a Lloyds underwriter called William Harper, were tried at the Old Bailey in early 1988. Aspin, Harper and Matson were found guilty and sent to prison – Aspin is still inside. Taylor was acquitted. Aspin, who was cast as the ringleader, pleaded ...”

“... spring to mind) may wish to consider why the Jamahiriyya, despite mending its fences with Washington and London in 2003-4 and dealing reasonably with Paris and Rome, should have proved so vulnerable to their sudden hostility. And the Libyan war should also prompt us to examine what the actions of the Western powers in relation to Africa and Asia, and ...”

“... In February 1981 Mrs Thatcher made an ecstatic pilgrimage to Washington to commune with the new President, Ronald Reagan, about such then modish topics as supply-side economics and the evil empire. Hugo Young recalls the ‘patronising astonishment’ with which her Foreign Secretary, Lord Carrington, witnessed this effusive display ...”

“... against evils, and perhaps there is no easier business,’ Trollope said of the anti-slavery MP John Bright, a theatrical orator who couldn’t be bothered with political detail. Celebrating the Civil War as a triumph of freedom over slavery is equally easy. A few decades ago, US historians tried to complicate this heroic narrative. Guided at times by ...”

“... biography of Buckley provoked discontent in right-wing reviewers (once they had given it a ‘Washington read’ and searched for their names in the index). Not all the facts of the life were convenient. What appeared to be a career on the permanent offensive looked somewhat different when viewed at longer range. The same Buckley who swooned over McCarthy ...”

“... else. Despite the confidently comprehensive title they gave it, the editors of the First Folio, John Heminges and Henry Condell, were defeated by the task of assembling all of their late colleague’s plays: we will never know how many nights’ sleep they lost over their failure to secure a copy of Love’s Labour’s Won, written before 1598 and printed ...”

“... According to John Cheever, 1948 was ‘the year everybody in the United States was worried about homosexuality’. And nobody was more worried than the federal government, which was rumoured to be teeming with gays and lesbians. One might think that Washington’s attentions would have been focused elsewhere – on the Soviet Union, for example, or on Communist spies – but in 1950, President Truman’s advisers warned him that ‘the country is more concerned about the charges of homosexuals in the government than about Communists ...”