“... 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 ...”

“... a hazardous business, and the prospect of losing your teeth for wooden dentures – like George Washington – was not a pleasing prospect. But narcotics lurk everywhere in the literature and experience of the 19th century, and not necessarily as a special ally of Romanticism. Opium stopped children crying, as well as providing a metaphysical escape route ...”

“... to seek a Stegner Fellowship in fiction at Stanford. The second time, at a chance encounter in Washington Square Park after Stone had dropped out of NYU, Mack told him that his lack of a degree would not matter – a Stegner did not require one. Stone applied and Stanford said yes. In the summer of 1962 he headed to California with Janice, now his ...”

“... with its relationship with France and Britain, and Mr Arafat’s lunches and dinners with John Major and François Mitterrand. One also wonders how, with so excellent ‘a friend in the White House’, Mr Arafat never thought to put the security of his own people at the very top of his wish list. All this is the result of the negotiators’ ignorance ...”

“... and rent a video while you did your laundry in machines named after movie stars; mine was called John Belushi. At 8.30 a.m., groups of kids in tie-died grunge were guzzling beer and nachos, and watching Rodney Dangerfield deliver double entendres about policemen’s balls on the big video screen. But Natalie and I had a running battle over my reluctance to ...”

“... that he had believed his client to be totally innocent all along. As my friend and former landlord John O’Sullivan used to be fond of saying (and him a Catholic and all, and editor of the National Review) if the Pope says he believes in God, he’s only doing his job. If he says he doesn’t believe in God, he may be onto something. And Cochran brings me to ...”

“... Designed to keep the hair from obscuring the vision, it was pulled so tight that, as the veteran John Shipp testified, a soldier could scarcely open his eyes. The Tsar’s soldiers had their queues stiffened by iron bars. But the most hated item of equipment was the neckstock, a kind of heavy leather cravat intended to force the soldier’s head erect ...”

“... shows a daredevil riding a high-wheeler, small wheel first, down the steps of the Capitol in Washington. Was there not a Huxley who traversed the Alps on such a mount? (It was not Aldous, that’s for sure.) High-wheelers suffered as much as any kind of bicycle from bad road surfaces, though there were strong men who rode them from Land’s End to ...”

“... love to get it up her and stifle myself between her breasts!’ Here is another Russian, visiting Washington: Surkov thought of the Kennedys. Marilyn Monroe, whom he had met at a party in Los Angeles. A stab of sorrow.     ‘I don’t like this fucking city,’ he growled. ‘It’s all male power. It’s as bad as Moscow.’ He nodded towards an ...”

“... and realpolitik is rightly blamed for prolonging the life and liberty of Barbie, but at least in Washington, unlike Whitehall, there are enough people who realise that democracies die by non-disclosure. The story falls into three distinct phases, and it seems reasonable to assume that Isabel Hilton, who covers Latin America for the Sunday Times, dug round ...”

“... judge from the writing-seminar circuit who had no connection with Guterson were quite slim. Set in Washington State in 1954 on San Piedro, an ‘island of five thousand damp souls’ in the Puget Sound, the novel opens in a small courthouse where a Japanese-American fisherman is on trial for the murder of a white fisherman. We soon learn that the ...”

“... Museum of Modern Art in New York has had a string of such figures, from William Rubin to John Elderfield to Leah Dickerman). Today the more telling split is between modern and contemporary fields (the latter has no exact birthdate – 1970, 1980, 1989), but this is a schism less between the university and the museum than between scholarly curators ...”

“... House; the next night, possibly at the president’s bidding, it was screened for an audience of Washington dignitaries. But not everybody appreciated it. It was immediately attacked by the newly established National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, which issued a statement declaring that ‘every resource of a magnificent new art has been ...”