“... to give them the credit of motive that the 27-year-old Cline gives her fictionalised renditions. John Waters dedicated Pink Flamingos to the Manson girls, lampooning the nation’s celebrity obsession with them. In Inherent Vice, Thomas Pynchon’s novel about the aftermath of the 1960s, Larry ‘Doc’ Sportello asks his girlfriend if she’ll wear a wig ...”

“... is addressed to Rufus, the protagonist of James Baldwin’s novel. Brown follows him to the George Washington Bridge, where he eventually jumps to his death (or freedom): ‘and you leap/Dirty against the whiteness/Of the sky to your escape/Through the whiteness//Of the water.’ Whiteness is all-encompassing: it requires a leap into space – to the stars in ...”

“... a redistricting map that sews up the outcome of a congressional election. In 2019, Chief Justice John Roberts declared that although the Supreme Court ‘does not condone excessive partisan gerrymandering’, any court-mandated intervention in district maps would inevitably look partisan and impugn the court’s neutrality. In 2017, during arguments in a ...”

“... assume in the mind if its metropolis were taken to be, not New York or Boston, Philadelphia or Washington, San Francisco or LA, but what the historical records establish as older than any of them, the most ancient city of North America: Santa Fe, New Mexico. And in the years since, that appealing perspective has never been lost sight of ...”

“... ammunition stores and protective walls. Even before the colonies declared independence, George Washington ensured that the Continental Army had a chief engineer; the founding of the US Army Corps of Engineers followed that of the United States itself by just three years.In 1802, Congress authorised the founding of the US Military Academy at West Point and ...”

“... is pretentious unless you are her first cousin or something, which is the status enjoyed by John Davis. His mother was Jackie’s father’s sister, and the list of his previous book-titles (The Bouviers, The Kennedys, The Guggenheims) shows a well-developed sensitivity to the uses of dynasty. This ‘intimate memoir’ joins a seasonal shelf of at ...”

“... riding a goat cart in Central Park’ before going off to Harvard, where his classmates included John Reed, T.S. Eliot and Conrad Aiken. From birth to death, Fortune – in the form of knowing nearly everyone who counted and being able to defend at least two sides of every major public issue of his time – always favoured him. The list of his friends, his ...”

“... kind of story, this – not just a routine flight from Orlando but a special flight from Washington DC, as it were, with the President on board. The man from the Pru is still right to think that if it hadn’t been this passenger, in this fatal predicament, it would in all likelihood have been someone else, somewhere else. There is still plenty of ...”

“... a US data firm, and a consultant for the biotech company Illumina. He also registered with Washington Speakers Bureau (through which Theresa May has received more than £600,000 in speaking fees since the pandemic began). In August 2018, Cameron was hired by Greensill as a ‘part-time adviser’ and given share options worth as much as $70 ...”

“... the impossibility, for him, of Williams’s kind of free verse, and his stubborn anti-Europeanism. John Crowe Ransom and Allen Tate had special claims on him. As a young man Lowell had fled Harvard to seek instruction from Ransom and Tate in Tennessee and at Kenyon College, Ohio. Tate, the stronger influence, saw himself as a sort of poetic father, assuming an ...”

“... at the Home Office in the week that France fell in May 1940, at which the home secretary, Sir John Anderson, declared that he found it hard to believe that any BUF member would help the Nazis. Presented with evidence that several had already been caught passing secrets, he still insisted that to imprison Mosley or his supporters would make them ...”

“... Village, where he lived for most of his adult life, sketchbook in hand, probably headed for Washington Square Park, having partaken of his morning pear, ‘eaten with a fork in the French style’, with a spot of brandy or a pill to calm his nerves. He read the Wordsworth poem when he delivered his six nonlectures at Harvard in 1952-53 ...”

“... of journalistic montage. It is, indeed, the mourning edition, the memorial edition. In Washington, the controversial World War Two memorial opened to the public for the first time. The controversy has been over the placing of the memorial – smack in the middle of the Mall, historically and aesthetically a symbol of the right of assembly and the ...”

“... a second career in American Intelligence. J. Edgar Hoover amassed tapes of sexual indiscretion in Washington, partly for his own prurient needs and partly for the ends of power. He caused blackmail letters to be sent from the FBI to Dr Martin Luther King, urging him to commit suicide.Historians and journalists have never quite known what to do about these ...”

“... a fact he doesn’t mention in his account of the incident in his memoirs or even in his diary. John McCloy, FDR’s assistant secretary of war, described it as ‘the most gallant thing I’ve ever seen’. Macmillan wasn’t one of those not infrequent war heroes who in peacetime are mild and eager to please. He remained dauntless and daunting in ...”