“... 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 ...”

“... Belgrade as Head of the American Mission to Tito. He ended the war as political adviser to General John Harding (of whose XIII Corps in Venezia Giulia pars minor fui), trying to stop young idiots like myself from starting a Third World War. Thus although he missed the early, heroic years of the resistance, he was ideally placed to observe, both in the field ...”

“... placed a unit of Black Berets on permanent alert at Fort Stewart in Georgia and Fort Lewis in Washington: men with hair cropped to a quarter of an inch and steel-soled jump boots. The Dutch merged Marines, Military and Civil Police to form the Special Assistance Unit of the Mariniers. The West Germans, who have no Federal police force, selected a unit of ...”

“... like Ralph Nader, Michael DeBakey, William Peter Blatty, Senator James Abourezk and General John Abizaid rarely visited Lebanon itself. As attached as some were to their grandmothers’ cooking and to bits of folklore, they preferred to keep the country at a distance. Anthony Shadid was an exception. As he wrote in this account of his struggle to ...”

“... The death penalty provides another opportunity for criticism that will get nowhere. Tony Blair and John Howard were both quick to realise that resistance to the use of the ‘ultimate punishment’ in Saddam’s case would be futile. On Bush’s first trip to Europe as President, he dismissed international concern about the widespread use of capital punishment ...”

“... of us don’t know what to look for, however, and the aerial view is alien to our sense of scale. John Wise, the pioneering American aeronaut, thought he was looking at a waterfall in a pleasure-garden when he saw Niagara Falls from space. ‘I was disappointed, for my mind had been bent on a soliloquy on Niagara’s raging grandeur … The little frothy ...”

“... had greeted Rodeo and Fancy Free. Few critics were at its premiere at the Coolidge Festival in Washington DC. Publicity had been so sparse that Copland, in a letter to his protégé Bernstein, wrote: ‘Martha Graham is supposedly doing a ballet of mine that weekend.’ Seven months later, when Appalachian Spring was performed in New York, the critical ...”

“... RA show is the last leg of an international tour while the Society’s neoclassical buildings in Washington Heights are being refurbished.The selection in the main galleries reflects Huntington’s original taxonomic intentions, with a daunting array of objects from 2500 BCE to the early 20th century, ranging from silk textiles and ceramics to ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... has shaken the assumptions that have underpinned economic and national security decision-making in Washington for the last thirty years.The change in circumstances has been dramatic. In 2001, after years of painful negotiation, the US managed China’s accession to the recently established World Trade Organisation, which sets the world’s trading rules. With ...”