“... hated the press and had plenty of rude things to say about Katharine Graham and Ben Bradlee of the Washington Post, but it never occurred to him that he could actually close the paper. John F. Kennedy took a different tack, mugging up on things that individual journalists might like to be praised about. He understood ...”

“... in the guarantees of the Constitution of the United States. I remembered that crazy night in Washington a few days ago, right after I heard that Magic had to leave the Lakers because he tested positive for the HIV virus. The tragedy of the Magicman kicked in the memory of that December 1978, the night that I think Doc first started working on the lyrics ...”

“... tones, while falling far short of withdrawing their support for Trump. Listening to Paul Ryan, John McCain, Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz and Orrin Hatch inveigh against the evil of white supremacy, you might have thought they’d just dusted off their copies of Between the World and Me. They can hardly claim to have been shocked by Trump’s response, however. As ...”

“... ten or so of his 17 films, he is, by anybody’s reckoning, flawless. It’s not surprising that John Ford never showed an interest; the ‘manly’ directors with whom Clift did work suspected he was gay, and, in John Huston’s case, tormented him for it. He was neither sardonic nor amused enough for Billy Wilder, but it ...”

“... the propaganda and makes a fair and sensible speech on the Middle East – such as Governor John Connally in 1980 – is taught a sharp lesson. Jewish Americans make up only 2.7 per cent of the population of the United States, but partly because of their concentration in some pivotal states and mainly because of their influence on the American media and ...”

“... forty years, as a fiction editor on the New Yorker, he advised and goaded Nabokov, Eudora Welty, John Cheever and John Updike. Now, at nearly ninety, Maxwell’s face has a prairie gauntness, as if hollowed out by exposure to those bracing talents. But in Britain his name is almost unknown. He was born in 1908 in ...”

“... I used to want to live to avoid your elegy,’ Robert Lowell wrote in ‘For John Berryman’ (included in Day by Day from 1977, the year Lowell died). The poem is subtitled ‘After reading his last “Dream Song”’, by which Lowell meant not number 385 in the 1969 edition of The Dream Songs but the poem that Berryman composed on 5 January 1972, two days before he leaped to his death from the Washington Avenue Bridge in Minneapolis ...”

“... Department officials. It offered ‘balanced’ debates on the issues between far right hawks like John Tower, and moderate hawks like John Mearsheimer, and rigorously excluded the views of anti-war representatives. (CNN’s subsequent release, via Turner Home Entertainment, of videotape ‘highlights’ of its war coverage ...”

“... London dispatched no less a figure than the chief of the Imperial General Staff, Field Marshal Sir John Harding. Within a month of his arrival in 1955, he told the cabinet with brutal candour that if self-determination was ruled out, ‘a regime of military government must be established and the country run indefinitely as a police state.’ He was as good as ...”

“... back for a good long while. I don’t know that he’s still not over it. Fifty Septembers ago, John Steinbeck set out across America with his old standard poodle Charley as company. It was election season, as it was this September: Nixon-Kennedy. Steinbeck was 58, younger than the Maestro and myself, and near the end of his life. One can feel it in his ...”

“... In the​ old ‘Rothko room’ of the pre-expansion Phillips Collection in Washington DC, it was possible to feel that you had stumbled on a private sanctuary, furnished with a single bench, in which four extraordinary paintings – soft-edged rectangles of pulsing orange and saturated blue, yellows both earthly and otherworldly – slowly worked their enchantment ...”

“... all these places, but consistently imagined that the resistance was being fomented by London and Washington. Howard says nothing about Strasbourg, the capital of Alsace, which was taken by Prussia in 1871, returned to France in 1919, taken again by Germany in 1940, and returned to France in 1945. The city had huge symbolic importance for the French, and in ...”

“... extracted from their Californian friends before leaving it empty and unused when they moved to Washington. To Nancy’s pet hairdresser, Julian, who always had to be given a seat on the Presidential jet together with her personal maid. To the 220 sets of china she ordered for the White House at $1000 a set, just when Reagan was cutting welfare. To the ...”

“... A few hours before the Washington Redskins consummately humiliated the Buffalo Bills in the 1992 Superbowl, I unfortunately asked a fellow American, an editor who has lived in Paris for ten years, to join a group of men and women for a beer, place a few bets, and watch the game with us live on Canal+. ‘Football is a most distasteful sport,’ sneered the American expatriate ...”

“... good stuff to come along. In his personal life, in bars or on manly roustabouts with the likes of John Huston and the Rat Pack, Bogart was inclined to believe in ‘Bogart’ just as his fans did. ‘Bogart’s a hell of a nice guy until around 11.30 p.m. After that, he thinks he’s Bogart,’ a Beverly Hills restaurant owner once said. But there is ...”