“... and, eventually, illegal material. Michael was subject to a variant of what the psychologist John Suler identified in 2001 as the ‘online disinhibition effect’: the phenomenon whereby computer users feel shielded by the apparent anonymity of the web, encouraging behaviour in which they would not normally indulge in the real world. Like much of what ...”

“... to provide centrist commentary on the vagaries of the international economy. According to the Washington Monthly, Howell Raines, the then editor of the op-ed page, forbade Krugman to use the word ‘lie’ to describe Bush’s policies during the 2000 campaign. By 2002, Krugman was using it all the time, and churning out column after column on what had ...”

“... its texture, its clichés. Over the years Amis has done a lot of virtuous wincing over clichés. John Fowles is a prominent target: ‘He managed a wan smile’; ‘God, you’re so naive.’ No expensive talk about Descartes, Marivaux, Lemprière and Aristophanes can procure a pardon for that sort of thing. Other reviewers may commend Thomas Harris for ...”

“... The gentle ‘we’ serves as a disembodied voiceover as we accompany the poets to Minneapolis’s Washington Avenue Bridge, where John Berryman jumped to his death; the White Horse Tavern, where Dylan Thomas supposedly drank the 18 whiskeys that killed him; 23 Fitzroy Road, where Plath laid her head on a folded towel in the ...”

“... among patriot leaders for his shabby dress. He was the antithesis of his vain and ambitious cousin John Adams, a patriot of a more conservative kind who later became America’s second president. Revolutionary politics, however, was the making of Samuel Adams. He was assumed to be the remote master of ceremonies at the Boston Tea Party in December 1773; and ...”

“... New York Sewer, the Stabber, the Plunderer and so on. ‘Here’s the Sewer’s exposure of the Washington gang,’ one cries, ‘and the Sewer’s exclusive account of a flagrant act of dishonesty committed by the Secretary of State when he was eight years old, now communicated, at a great expense, by his own nurse.’ No one but Dickens could make the ...”

“... a higher profile target in recent weeks – is unlikely to divert American attention from Syria. Washington has made it clear that it intends to deal with both regimes at once. When Colin Powell visited Bashar Assad after the conquest of Baghdad it was to name the price of Baathism’s survival in Syria: ending support for Hizbollah in Lebanon, closing the ...”

“... and General Staff School at Leavenworth, and already when working in the Army Department in Washington he was picked out as a protégé by General MacArthur, the Chief of Staff: ‘This is the best officer in the Army. When the next war comes he should go right to the top.’ If this was really what was thought of him, his career structure seems very ...”

“... Frantz describe in detail one deal in which Clifford and his partner Robert Altman, well-known in Washington social circles since he was married to Wonderwoman, bought and sold shares through BCCI and ended up with $9.8m in their pockets. Kerry reveals that Clifford’s and Altman’s firm was paid some $45m in legal fees by BCCI. That sort of money persuaded ...”

“... is reported to have likened him to Abraham Lincoln. Even as he ceased to serve the purposes of Washington and Pretoria at the end of the Cold War, he continued to persuade Western right-wing lobbyists and anti-Communist crusaders to part with their money: ‘hearts, minds and purses’ was the Savimbi strategy on this front and it paid off handsomely. He ...”

“... added to an infantryman’s pack.)* We are in the sky, as the jungle is painted with napalm; in Washington DC, studying maps with optimistic generals; at home waiting, when American day is night in Vietnam; on the ground, as desperate dots struggle to occupy a hill scraped bare by artillery, then abandon it as soon as it is taken.Everyone was in the dark in ...”

“... talking seriously to their US counterparts, including Cold War scholars such as Melvyn Leffler and John Gaddis. Radchenko, more than twenty years younger and so essentially post-Soviet, arrived in the US as an exchange student (improbably, from the island of Sakhalin in the Pacific), wrote a PhD on Sino-Soviet relations under the supervision of Odd Arne Westad ...”

“... by high-cost insurance plans. His claim to transcend the corruption of ‘business as usual in Washington’ was in this way nullified by his practice of the usual arts of political adaptation. Those compromises are remembered daily on right-wing radio. All the vehemence and animosity of the anti-Obama movement is concentrated now on handing him a defeat ...”

“... without the sex: the country mortgaged to the IMF; placemanship and jobbery everywhere from the Washington Embassy to the Bank of England, and an indecorous last-minute vote-buying exercise involving both the Ulster Unionists and the Irish Republicans. On the night before the vote of confidence that put him out of office I met Callaghan at a party ...”

“... phoney ‘consultation’ process over nuclear power, and further away, at a conference in Washington, an ‘informal agreement’ marking a new commitment to ‘tackling climate change’ and resulting in a ‘non-binding’ declaration which reflected ‘a real change of mood’. Just what the world needs – more hot air. And then the news moves on ...”