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“... 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 ...”

“... what in the 1930s the American historian Herbert Bolton called ‘the epic of Greater America’. John Elliott’s long awaited book is just that. It not only fills an obvious gap – more like a chasm – but sets the pattern for a whole new historiography of the European colonial empires. As with all Elliott’s books, the architecture and the scope are ...”

“... of Cape Town and Table Mountain. Among those who have bought houses here are Earl Spencer, Elton John and Michael Douglas, but the oddity is that, while you might assume, as you drive through its wonderful avenues, that Constantia’s residents are nothing if not respectable, you’d be dead wrong, because not only did Mark set himself up in palatial style ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... the use of the bomb, while the 31 August 1946 issue of the New Yorker had been entirely devoted to John Hersey’s unsparing account of what the nuclear attack had meant for civilians in Hiroshima. Stimson’s 7300-word testimonial – which was in fact written by McGeorge Bundy, later national security adviser to Kennedy and Johnson, with input and edits from ...”

“... though as Bower says, it’s not a criticism you’ll find being levelled in the New York Times or Washington Post, both of which have similar structures.) Black’s first steps in the newspaper business had come in 1965 when he bought a half-share in two weekly newspapers for $500. He moved to a small town near Montreal, and began editing the Knowlton ...”

“... 2277, and your character begins the game living in Vault 101, a bomb shelter set near the ruins of Washington. The game has the usual props and targets, but one of the most striking things about it is the opportunity it offers to explore the bombed-out, desolate, intensely evocative city. This is something which, once you’ve done it, I suspect will be ...”