“... the UK down or have an animus towards the prime minister or the attorney general. They included Franklin Berman QC, a former FCO legal adviser (‘nothing less than an overwhelmingly clear legal case will do,’ he said, and this was not such a case); Ralph Zacklin, a former head of legal affairs at the UN (the Iraq war was ‘an illegal act’ which ...”

“... but unsuccessful; they left him roundly defeated for the leadership but narrowly elected as Michael Foot’s deputy by the end of 1981. ‘I felt myself compelled to agree with Michael in public on all issues at all times,’ Healey admits. It was hardly a happy position; and a less robust and pragmatic man might have ...”

“... The main vehicle for all of this was the Congress for Cultural Freedom, ‘run by CIA agent Michael Josselson from 1950 till 1967’. My first encounter (pun unintended) with the Congress was through The God that Failed, a compendium of confessions by well-known former Communists (and/or sympathisers) that included Gide, Silone and Koestler; it was ...”

“... The Flowering of the Landscape Garden (1999). In response to these changing tastes, Benjamin Franklin observed in 1783 that ‘the generous soul who now endeavours to find out whether the friends he entertains like best claret or burgundy, champagne or Madeira’, would now enquire whether they wanted musk or lily, rose or bergamot.Muchembled boldly ...”

“... especially on the right – appear to regard Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, James Madison and John Adams as the American equivalents of Plato, Aristotle, Cato and Brutus, while the wider culture acknowledges the near-superhuman qualities of the men of 1776. The founders in their periwigs, breeches and frockcoats hold a secure ...”

“... Nussbaum that democracy requires a strong national identity on the part of its citizens, and Michael Walzer insists that his circle of allegiances (‘spheres of affection’) starts, not with the outermost periphery, but at the ‘centre’. In a book with the same title, For Love of Country, Maurizio Viroli offers further, more sustained reflections on ...”

“... among many other things, the Paris of Balzac and Baudelaire. He had a vogue also in America, where Franklin, for one, understood an important element of his system, and could therefore explain how the Americans sustained a four-year revolutionary war without having any secured money – by printing it, and waiting for the inevitable depreciation, which meant ...”

“... growing awareness that high blood pressure could be a risk to health. It wasn’t enough to save Franklin D. Roosevelt. In 1941 his blood pressure was measured at 188/105 (the norm is around 150/90 or lower); it wasn’t checked again until 1944, when it hadn’t improved. By the time of the Yalta Conference in February 1945 it was 260/150, and shortly ...”

“... manuscripts to do with the Society, were edited by Mary Thale and published twenty years ago. Now Michael Davis has collected and edited all the many publications of the LCS. They fill four large volumes, to which Davis has added a volume of contemporary pamphlets, mainly by its supporters, and a further volume of Parliamentary debates and Government reports ...”

“... far as the “Flu” is concerned the whites have the whole big show to themselves,’ J. Franklin Johnson wrote to the Baltimore Afro-American. It was just as well, he added, or ‘health talks to coloured people would have been printed by the wholesale in 72-point type in the daily papers.’ Most flu epidemics have a U-shaped distribution ...”

“... scene to Geneva, for reasons which I understand’; and the publisher of this book itself, Michael Schmidt of the Carcanet Press and of PN Review (of which Davie is an editor), is Davie’s double-goer off in the opposite direction (‘American by conditioning, but Mexican by citizenship and an English resident by preference’). Davie repeatedly ...”

“... profundity is also signalled in the title – a quotation from Chief Seathl to President Franklin Pierce, which goes on to warn: ‘the whites too shall pass – perhaps sooner than other tribes. Continue to contaminate your bed and you will one day suffocate in your own waste.’ All this suggests that there is an important theme somewhere in the ...”

“... assert. For example, in his splendid 1991 study, The Crisis Years: Kennedy and Khrushchev 1960-63, Michael Beschloss demonstrated that Kennedy had been privately relieved by the building of the Berlin Wall, had publicly almost refrained from commenting on it, and had waited until two years after it was safely built before using it as a sound-stage for his Ich ...”

“... by the gigantic fraud set up by Roberto Calvi and Michele Sindona of the Banco Ambrosiano and the Franklin Bank. Like Abedi, Calvi and Sindona felt they were on the side of God – and had not a little help in their endeavours from the Vatican. Abedi’s techniques were also used, almost to the letter, by Michael Hand in ...”

“... USS Ranger. He had argued with senior officers in Boston, but in France found an ally in Benjamin Franklin, the American commissioner in Paris, and a womaniser unfazed by Jones’s own sexual profligacy. In April 1778, Jones sailed the Ranger from Brest, intending to harry British ships on the Atlantic coast. Two weeks later he seized and burned ...”