“... worse than the Great Depression. But it has done so by ripping up the economic rule book, the ‘Washington consensus’ which has been central to the running of the world economy for the last four decades. In order to create the necessary economic stimulus, central banks have been buying back their own debt with newly created money. It works like ...”

“... Russian corruption. The project was originally commissioned by a conservative news outlet, the Washington Free Beacon, but ended up being financed by Hillary Clinton’s campaign.The result was a collection of brief reports asserting links between Trump’s team and Russia. The dossier claimed that the ‘Russian regime has been cultivating, supporting and ...”

“... brought back corvée labour and introduced bombing from the air, while officials in Washington created the institutions that Haitians would have to live with: the army, above all, which now claims to have the country ‘in its hands’, was created by an act of the US Congress. Demobilised by Aristide in 1995, it never knew a non-Haitian ...”

“... War movement was the same man who had, half a century before, hounded Emma Goldman and John Reed and, later, put Leon Trotsky under surveillance in Mexico. This longevity makes Hoover’s biography a wonderful subject. Powers’s book is painfully neutral and somewhat pedestrian at times, but his authoritative command of his sources makes it ...”

“... President entirely. In its aftermath, however, he has all but disappeared. The Russian Embassy in Washington is often unable to contact him for days on end to deliver messages from the White House. When requests go through to Russian aides and embassy staff asking that Yeltsin be informed of, and respond to, communications, they are batted back with the reply ...”

“... knew how to strongarm a vote and how to hold a grudge. He was a rival to the stylish, charismatic John F. Kennedy, but as his running mate was vital to JFK’s election in 1960; the alliance brought him to power after Kennedy’s assassination in 1963. Kennedy’s death more or less ensured that Johnson would be elected the following year, but when he ...”

“... grand reopening, two of its former bosses filed conflicting accounts of its recent history. Both John Tooley (1970-88) and Jeremy Isaacs (1988-97) describe the House’s considerable achievements over the past half-century; and Isaacs’s part in pushing through the magnificent rebuilding was heroic. What we still want to know is why things also went so ...”

“... I have never read a life like John Fuegi’s of Brecht. Revisionism doesn’t begin to describe it. This is dartboard stuff, effigy abuse, voodoo biography. If Fuegi could get inside the Dorotheenfriedhof, uproot Brecht’s jagged scalene headstone, dig through six feet of Brandenburg sand and a zinc coffin, and do something to the remains involving chicken heads, inverted crosses and black candles, I don’t doubt that he would ...”

“... seems, if not unpatriotic, then at least peevish and small-minded,’ Ron Charles wrote in his Washington Post review, before gently hinting at the truth: that this is an interesting novel, and in many ways a good one, which is blighted by some very obvious weaknesses. The title comes from a ‘Traditional US Army Marching Cadence’, which sets the tone ...”

“... How many​ living novelists does the FBI keep files on? Is there a filing cabinet in Washington that contains a rundown of Jonathan Franzen’s feud with Oprah Winfrey? Do the Feds keep track of how many words Joyce Carol Oates writes in a day? Do they monitor Karl Ove Knausgaard’s border crossings? Did they know who Elena Ferrante was before the editors of the New York Review of Books did? Or how much Martin Amis drinks these days, and where? These scenarios seem unlikely ...”

“... future performance. Not that this administration was equally in the dark. During the 1980s, both John Roberts and Samuel Alito were bright young recruits to the Reagan Justice Department’s efforts to reverse the liberal jurisprudence of the Supreme Court; and their membership of the right-wing Federalist Society gave the neo-conservative establishment ...”

“... like a divinity and he looks like the portrait on every dollar bill.’ The resemblance to George Washington is undeniable, although there is a creepy hint of Alastair Sim too. Never one to underestimate his own impact, he reported to his second wife, Nowell, that a colleague had said he was ‘one of three English public men who could command the greatest ...”

“... the nation was brainwashed into seeing the Crystal Palace as a ‘Temple of Peace’. John Tallis, in his guidebook, observed that ‘peace was on every lip’, and not, as one would expect, the Victorian equivalent of ‘Wow!’ Jeffrey Auerbach is much occupied with charting such changes in aspiration and emphasis. His book is less concerned ...”

“... rationalist, anti-clerical and republican, showing more affinity with the Co. Derry freethinker John Toland (1670-1722) than with such rosary-bead nationalists as Pádraic Pearse. After Toland, the figure that mattered most to him, historically at least, was Wolfe Tone. The rising of the United Irishmen in 1798 has long been important for republicans ...”

“... tired of repeating, ‘in the Sixties we fought a war against poverty, and poverty won.’ Did Washington’s intervention actually exacerbate the problems of the inner cities, as American conservatives have always claimed, or did it simply fail to engage with them? Lemann takes the latter, more moderate line. In the North there was no ...”