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“... that make him a target for killers. This is Abraham Lincoln, the newly-elected President, come to Washington to take over from Buchanan and become a warlord. The little sharp-eyed man at Lincoln’s flank, with a derringer bulging in his pocket, is a detective called Pinkerton. The hulking young bodyguard with two conspicuous guns is Ward Hill Lamon, who ...”

“... family, after the takeover of the firm by Smith, Elder & Co (itself soon to be taken over by John Murray). A descendant – loyally named Richard Bentley – had lovingly conserved and catalogued them for posterity. In 1967, the BL acquired a tranche of early Macmillan papers: Harold Macmillan, it seems, was keen that the family firm’s archive should ...”

“... The Founding Fathers of the United States were mainly Southerners: between them, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison can take credit for drafting the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, winning the Revolutionary War, and preserving America’s independence through its turbulent early decades ...”

“... War of Independence, Eutaw Springs, not far from Yorktown, where Cornwallis was to surrender to Washington six weeks later. ‘From a safe distance, thousands of miles from his African homeland, Tony Small watched a battle.’ The original readers of Scott and G.P.R. James would have responded to that opening sentence. Tony Small is a young black slave who ...”

“... of Inventing a Nation might be tagged as tales of avarice. Even the ‘protocolossus’ George Washington shambles onto Vidal’s stage ‘seriously broke’ and grumbling about money. Most accounts point up that he was elected to almost everything (commander of the army, chair of the Constitutional Convention, president of the nation), and gave the rude ...”

“... System (CBS), created and run by William Paley; Time Inc, including Life, owned by Henry Luce; the Washington Post and Newsweek, run by Philip and then by Kay Graham; and the Chandler family’s Los Angeles Times. Beginning in the Thirties with President Roosevelt, who, more than any President before him, manipulated the newspapers and the new possibilities of ...”

“... hybrid – built on the banks of the Potomac between 1963 and 1971 in the Foggy Bottom area of Washington DC. Its handy location between the centre of government and the traditional residences of Georgetown proved attractive to congressmen and members of the Nixon administration, who flocked to the new apartments. In 1967, the Democratic National Committee ...”

“... as much North American as Latin American: the son of a diplomat, he grew up bilingually in Washington, and has taught at Harvard. As a child, he has said, Mexico seemed to him a non-existent country, an invention of his father’s imagination. It was not until the age of 16 that he went to live in Mexico City; later he chose to write in Spanish ...”

“... George Kennan, then the deputy head of the US mission in Moscow, sent a 5300-word telegram to Washington, hoping to alert his superiors to the threat of Soviet expansionism. Kennan had complained repeatedly and fruitlessly about what he saw as America’s indulgent attitude towards the Soviet Union, but for a crucial moment in 1946 his idea that the US ...”

“... became the US government’s trusted ally. In 1981, the US ambassador in Honduras reported to Washington that he was ‘deeply concerned at increasing evidence of officially sponsored/sanctioned assassinations’: this wasn’t the message the Reagan administration wanted to hear and he was quickly replaced by ...”

“... ignorant, the most bigoted, the most superstitious of all the Roman Catholics in Christendom,’ John Adams, the second American president, wrote in 1815. The notion that they could form a ‘confederation of free governments’, as the Venezuelan revolutionary Francisco de Miranda had proposed, was as ‘absurd as similar plans would be to establish ...”

“... Verrocchio: Sculptor and Master of Renaissance Florence, at the National Gallery of Art in Washington they were named – with surprising confidence – as Verrocchio with Leonardo and Peugino. It is undeniable that parts of the panel are superbly painted but if Verrocchio was involved in a major way that would make him responsible for the ...”

“... are a message to all the region’s autocrats, particularly those supported by the West, and to Washington and Tel Aviv, which, after spending years lamenting the lack of democracy in the Muslim world, have responded with a mixture of trepidation, fear and hostility to the emergence of a pro-democracy movement in the Arab world’s largest country. If these ...”

“... fallen state of the American publishing industry. (Madison’s book traces a completed cycle from Washington Irving, who helped his publisher with money in an emergency, to Clifford Irving, who embezzled his publisher out of a million dollars. The cases are symptomatic.) In Madison’s analysis, agency destroys the sodality which flourished in the golden age ...”

“... The late Lord Caccia, who had the misfortune to arrive in Washington as British Ambassador in November 1956 just as the ‘special relationship’ hit its all-time low with the abrupt American-driven ceasefire on the Suez Canal, was much given in later years to recalling how flabbergasted he had been by an encounter he witnessed on the 17th of that month ...”