“... in these programmes, ‘we had arrived big-time on the political scene.’ Adams and the SDLP’s John Hume together worked out the theological basis for what, after many drafts, was to become the British-Irish Downing Street Declaration of December 1993 – the document which paved the way for the IRA ceasefire of August 1994. The programmes give most of the ...”

“... Cavendish himself and by four men who sailed with him, Antony Knivet, a young gentleman volunteer; John Davis, the great navigator; J. Jane, a friend of Davis’s; and Thomas Lodge the poet. Thomas Cavendish was a man of considerable estate but varying fortunes, and like many of his contemporaries he took to the sea to improve them: they were at their charming ...”

“... the country in search of old records that a handful of them – Skip James, Son House, Mississippi John Hurt – were ‘rediscovered’. They became draws on the coffee-house and festival circuit, while recordings by John Lee Hooker, Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf, who had made their names playing house-rocking, amplified ...”

“... which our minds seem incapable of taking in is that, were the explosion to occur over New York or Washington, London or Moscow, one megaton would be equivalent to a million instantaneous deaths,’ he wrote in the New York Review of Books. ‘The President may protest that his SDI dream implies a protection of people and not of silos. But however many times ...”

“... and am astonished when I see on the news in the evening the vast concourse of people gathered in Washington. I don’t read any official estimates of the numbers though it’s to be hoped they estimate more accurately in the US than they do here, where any demonstration of which the police disapprove – the Stop the War marches, for instance – is ...”

“... he can appoint and dismiss the trustees. When speaking to the Federal Communications Commission in Washington, he has tended to stress his control of the trust, because this emphasises that his assets are – since he became an American citizen in 1985 – American-owned. At the same time, when speaking to the Securities and Exchange Commission in New ...”

“... had neglected, precisely because whites didn’t live there. In fact, the incarceration rates in Washington, DC, the black-majority city where Forman worked as a public defender, were roughly equal to those in cities where black people had far less influence over sentencing policy. Racial bias alone could hardly explain why a ‘chocolate city’ like DC was ...”

“... on in their cabin, and the electric heater – so that it ‘would be warm on our return’. John Thayer, a young neighbour of the Eustis’s in Pennsylvania, shared a suite of rooms with his parents. After the impact, which he noticed hardly at all (‘if I had had a brimful glass of water in my hand not a drop would have been spilled’), he told them ...”

“... the hapless pawn willed his alienation from America, elected to abandon the scholar’s lot for Washington glitter and to place worldly success and proximity to power above literary achievement. His ‘failure’, if it can be called such, lay in undervaluing his gifts. John Jay Chapman blamed Adams and his fellow ...”

“... up the pages of the New York Review of Books for decades with mini-memoirs about his childhood in Washington DC (his grandfather was a US Senator) and his delight aloft as a boy pilot (his father was a pioneer in aviation and a business partner of Amelia Earhart, who doted on young Gore), his serio-comic encounters with Tennessee Williams, Eleanor Roosevelt ...”

“... whose rigid commitment to these ideals brought him enormous success but also ultimate failure. John Thompson offers us a different Wilson. He plays down the President’s Christianity, arguing that this was sincere but not dominating, and portrays him as ‘a practising politician’ who ‘travelled with very little ideological baggage, adopting and ...”

“... that men are sometimes wicked on purpose; Robert Kee, the hot-eyed public prosecutor … When John Birt arrived at the BBC as Deputy Director-General at the end of the 1980s, apocalyptic assessments of the programme were back in fashion. According to Birt, the BBC’s Chairman, Marmaduke Hussey, regarded Panorama as a microcosm of a BBC that was ‘out of ...”

“... worse, statesmen around the world praise its role in Egypt’s ‘democratic transition’. When John Kerry visited Cairo last year he reported that Sisi had given him ‘a very strong sense of his commitment to human rights’. These issues, he said, were ‘very much’ on Sisi’s mind. For more than thirty years it was US policy to support autocratic ...”

“... out of the hat. ‘Nikos was eager to show me something he had received from Stephen Spender, in Washington, which is on his desk in the sitting room. “Look,” he said, “a reproduction of Andrea del Castagno’s The Youthful David.” He said he was not sure how he would tell Spender about me when Spender returned to London.’ Plante’s later diaries ...”

“... disloyalty, ambition, greed, insecurity and all the British hypocrisies that he crashed into. John Preston has made the most of it, providing not only a very readable and amusing book but also the fullest account yet of what actually happened. Some of his sourcing could be clearer – there are rather vague appendices and no footnotes – but he is ...”