“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... hospitals in unmarked vans, and unloaded at back entrances. I heard about despair. I heard General John Abizaid, commander of US Central Command, say of the insurgents: ‘I don’t think that they’re growing. I think that they’re desperate.’ I heard about hope. I heard General Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, say: ‘I came away ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... cars, houses, people and, naturally, drugs. To read Rieff on Miami is to recall with nostalgia John Berger’s The Seventh Man, with its haunting photographs by Jean Mohr of migrant Turkish or Italian workers in Switzerland, and its affecting notions about home and wandering. Rieff deals, not with a potentially Left force, but with violently right-wing ...”

“... Sussex to Yorkshire to establish them in a new home. The foreign editor threatened to send the Washington correspondent instead, so I promised I’d be on the first plane into Santiago. The Chilean military had closed the country to the outside world, and I knew that it would be some days before it opened up. They did not want too many foreign ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... and generally behaving in a strange way’. Finally, David Ormsby-Gore, Britain’s Ambassador in Washington, rang Macmillan and told him that Hogg’s succession ‘would be a tremendous blow to Anglo-American relations and would in fact end the special relationship’ – so appalled had Kennedy been by what Harriman told him. For Macmillan that was ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... the Iranian explanation that they originated from contaminated imported equipment. Two years ago, Washington’s challenge to Tehran was being expressed in stronger terms than it is now. At that time, Britain was keen to encourage the more moderate faction in Iran, led by the then president, Mohammad Khatami. Together with Germany and France, the Blair ...”

“... It encouraged an extremist Islamism, and an equally extreme warlordism in lieu of government. Washington made its own generous contribution. Rather than endorse Gorbachev’s efforts to forge a coalition government and deny all sides an illusory ‘victory’, Reagan and then Bush, with Pakistani connivance, ratcheted up support for the most murderous of ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... To celebrate the inauguration of Barack Obama in 2009 a concert was held in Washington DC, on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. ‘In the course of our history, only a handful of generations have been asked to confront challenges as serious as the ones we face right now,’ Obama said, truly, after will.i.am and Sheryl Crow had busked their way through Bob Marley’s ‘One Love’, with Herbie Hancock noodling on piano; and the Gay Men’s Chorus of Washington DC had pounded out ‘My Country, ’Tis of Thee’; and Garth Brooks had gurned through ‘American Pie’; and so on and so on ...”

“... Americans, is close to hero-worship, treats FDR’s endless deceptions and tricks with indulgence. John Steinbeck, whom FDR once persuaded to do some spying for him in Mexico, came to the conclusion that he liked mystery, subterfuge and indirect tactics for their own sake. But maybe, like many privileged people, he didn’t see why the world shouldn’t be ...”