“... Thein Sein was ‘sincere’, he replied that it was because the ‘the Lady’ thought so. Unlike Nelson Mandela, she has always rejected armed struggle. Unlike the Dalai Lama, she didn’t flee from persecution. On top of this, she is slim, beautiful, witty, cultured and English-speaking. Her uniform of traditional Burmese blouse and skirt, with a tropical ...”

“... of the writers who signed up to the project were unknown, and would remain so. Others, such as Nelson Algren (the director of its Illinois branch), Conrad Aiken, Saul Bellow and John Cheever, had already begun to make their reputations. Studs Terkel would find his calling when the FWP sent him out onto the streets of Chicago to collect oral history. Most ...”

“... the coat in a pool hall a few months later, a student who had reported the theft of the coat from Nelson Cleaners and was able to identify a cigarette burn on the hem: the police had their burglar. There are a welter of coincidences and head-to-head encounters in the memoir, Braly tending to cast himself as the hopeless chancer. He fumbled his way through ...”

“... in southern Angola, which jump-started the disintegration of apartheid. It was no surprise when Nelson Mandela made one of his first trips as president to Havana.New York City has long been used as a propaganda venue for outspoken critics of America, who figure that they are unlikely to be assassinated in the vicinity of Wall Street and Rockefeller ...”

“... men were caught breaking into the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee in June 1972, Richard Helms, then director of the CIA, refused to help with the cover-up. In February 1973, after his re-election, Nixon fired Helms and replaced him with James Schlesinger. In an initiative to regain public trust as the crisis escalated, Schlesinger announced ...”

“... when trying to secure its bid for the 2010 World Cup, the South African FA sent the 85-year-old Nelson Mandela, already frail and in poor health, on a 17-hour trip to Trinidad to meet Warner in a final attempt to secure his precious three votes. In the end, South Africa won the final bidding round 14-10, so we may infer that the trip was a success. But ...”

“... Quote me some. Oh I see. You can’t.     No answer: only the extreme hooded-eye treatment. Richard Avedon would need a studio’s worth of lights and reflectors to rig up this expression on an unsuspecting Salman. At the moment, though, a passing waiter with an Instamatic could have easily bettered it. Nobody spoke. Not even Christopher Hitchens. And I ...”

“... street was demolished in 1971, but you can see it clearly in the film 10 Rillington Place starring Richard Attenborough and John Hurt, filmed on location shortly before demolition. The houses had bay windows going all the way down to the ground, and no front steps or front gardens. Number 10 was the last house on the left, jammed up against the wall of a ...”

“... liberals. This was published by the Council on Foreign Relations. Book the second was written for Nelson Rockefeller and called for ‘tactical’ nuclear weapons. Book the third, wisely entitled The Necessity for Choice, refined the case for massive conventional war with thermonuclear options only as ‘a last resort’. In office, of course, Kissinger flung ...”

“... has to make’. But there is a second doubt that is harder to dismiss. It is the doubt raised by Nelson Goodman’s famous paradox, and we can express it by saying that the ability even to pick out some theories as simpler (never mind truer) than others itself rests on an inductive principle. In the case of our swans, someone might have a theory that all ...”

“... Manhattan’s bohemian answer to Hollywood’s Brat Pack (Emilio Estevez, Andrew McCarthy, Judd Nelson, Ally Sheedy, Molly Ringwald – almost any actor who appeared in a John Hughes teen film qualified). The Literary Brat Pack was a journalistic readymade, roping together a number of writers who may have scarcely known each other and treating them as a ...”

“... the moderation of its leaders, among them President Eisenhower and the New York governor Nelson Rockefeller, and built a formidable counter-establishment infrastructure that extended from local school boards to state capitols to think tanks. Leading the rightist rising were the conservative intellectuals in the orbit of William F. Buckley’s ...”

“... he gave a full set of the Papers to Senator Fulbright and tried to interest Senators Gaylord Nelson and George McGovern in publicising them or printing them in the Congressional Record. But Congressional courage, then as now, was in short supply. No Senator, not even Fulbright, accepted his offer. On 2 March 1971, Ellsberg called Neil Sheehan of the New ...”

“... Lola Howard Archer, lived separately over the Thames at a now-vanished address in Southwark – 18 Nelson Square – which was bombed later that year. It was she who registered her son’s birth at Finsbury Register Office more than a month later, on 17 May. Later in 1940 – perhaps to escape the Blitz – the family moved to Weston-super-Mare, the Somerset ...”

“... story of Romance in Marseille’s anti-hero Lafala was inspired by the stowaway tale of Nelson Simeon Dede, a Nigerian seaman who had arrived in the Vieux Port missing both legs and with new-found riches. McKay recounted the story in a letter to his literary agent. Dede had hidden in the hold of a French Fabre Company steamship bound for New ...”