“... October 1962 was not August 1914 because John Kennedy had learned the lessons of Munich, which may be summarised as follows: get angry in private, think before you speak, say what you want, make clear what you’re prepared to do, ignore bluster, repeat yourself as often as necessary and keep the pressure on. Where Kennedy learned the mixture of forbearance and resolution which lies at the heart of international peace and good marriages is a mystery; his mother and father were no better at solving problems than Neville Chamberlain and Adolf Hitler ...”

“... Cook’s chart of the Northwest into the draught of an inland sea that covered most of Washington and British Columbia. This ‘mer de l’ouest’ had been dreamed up forty years before by two French cartographers, Philippe Buache and Joseph Nicolas Delisle – Buache had claimed that his map was ‘supported by every kind of proof . . . except ...”

“... London house, 46 Lower Belgrave Street, the countess was violently assaulted and her husband, John Bingham, seventh earl of Lucan, disappeared, offer all things to all tastes. The story has the violent glamour of crime fiction with the additional thrill of reality, and the facts are just enough to make a narrative while leaving hugely tantalising areas of ...”

“... symbols and symptoms of the decline, the sudden physical shrinking of American newspapers. The Washington Post was once a behemoth, so big it could be physically hard to get to grips with. Now it feels like a freesheet. The Sunday edition of the New York Times was famous for being so heavy that paperboys would lob it onto the porch and accidentally kill ...”

“... campaigner and local Labour Party member, read some of her poems, including a rumbustious reply to John Betjeman which she called ‘In Praise of Slough’ – ‘those bombs aren’t such a huge joke any more.’ The main session over, we were offered Judith Chernaik on Shelley’s feminism or Elma Dangerfield on Byron and Shelley or Marilyn Butler on the ...”

“... British Government’s promise to establish a ‘national home’ for the Jews in Palestine. The Washington Naval Treaty of 1921 was negotiated by Balfour, and although he never displayed an interest in social reform he greatly encouraged state expenditure on scientific and medical research. Balfour was at the very least an eminent and interesting busybody ...”

“... got Kenner to drive him (he didn’t drive) to visit Ezra Pound in St Elizabeth’s Hospital in Washington DC, where he’d been incarcerated in 1945, having pleaded insanity to avoid a treason charge for the seditious radio talks he delivered in Italy during the war. He remained at St Elizabeth’s for 12 years. The old man McLuhan and Kenner saw there ...”

“... battlefield as imagined in Swarming and the Future of Conflict (2000) by the RAND Corporation’s John Arquilla and David Ronfeldt. Technology, Arquilla and Ronfeldt argue, will soon make it possible for small clusters of loosely organised military units to conduct brief and co-ordinated strikes, then disperse. Message boards, similarly, allow lone hackers to ...”

“... at the Hyatt Regency Hotel in Kansas City (114 dead). The Brooklyn Bridge stands today because John Roebling designed it to be six times stronger than it needed to be. So when Washington Roebling discovered, after his father’s death, that an unscrupulous supplier had introduced substandard wire into the cables, it was ...”

“... for the CIA’s Polish operations at the time, is unimpressed.) Walesa has the air of a Polish John Prescott, only bigger. He has not carried the last 25 years as well as the other Poles. What is even stranger, I find myself in an assembly of political ghosts. Leaving aside the Chinese, who avoid public discussions, a surprising number of those who made ...”

“... on the down escalator at nine o’clock in the morning. When the Number 30 passed a statue of John F. Kennedy in Marylebone Road, a teenager looked up at his mother. ‘It all started with him,’ he said. ‘I know what you mean,’ his mother said. ‘He was the first to get this amount of coverage.’ In Regent’s Park rows of old ladies were sitting ...”

“... on their way to becoming a distinct American people has a good pedigree, including J. Hector St John de Crèvecoeur’s Letters from an American Farmer, the source of all but one of Butler’s epigraphs. Crèvecoeur’s famous question was: ‘What then is this new man the American?’ His immediate answer – ‘that strange mixture of blood, which you ...”

“... Kleinzahler was born in 1949 and grew up in Fort Lee, New Jersey, just across from the George Washington Bridge. He went to college in Wisconsin, but dropped out and drifted a while, before enrolling at the University of Victoria in British Columbia, where his favourite 20th-century poet, Basil Bunting, happened to be teaching that year. Afterwards he ...”

“... Paris, ‘Are you an Englishman?’ and received the reply: ‘Thank God I am, Sir.’ He quotes Washington Irving’s wonderful description of the English traveller in Italy who had his servant prepare and serve his meals in his carriage: beefsteak, ‘ketchup and soy, and Cayenne pepper, and Harvey sauce, and a bottle of port wine, from that warehouse the ...”

“... wanted 370 miles, the House roughly double. The New York Times was quick to play to the mood in Washington and proposed a troubling parlour game, inviting a handful of architects to design the Congressional project as a neighbourly fence that made the most of its unattractive character, often by pretending it had nothing to do with exclusion. The fence, the ...”