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“... all communications beyond the reach of a human shout. None of the buttons pressed in Moscow or Washington, if either lay beneath the rays, would function. The silos would not open on command, or fire their missiles. During this period the affected country would be, in effect, anaesthetised, and the follow-on missiles from the other side could pick off ...”

“... two annoying near-KGB experiences. A creepy individual named Yuri Shvets published a book called Washington Station: My Life as a KGB Spy in America, which was fully as lurid and preposterous as its title (put out by the ‘respected firm’ of Simon and Schuster) might suggest. Its central allegation was that an old personal enemy of mine had been a key ...”

“... a foreign country, where things are differently done. I had not encountered the Tennessee novelist Peter Taylor before, and this book came as something of a revelation. As a writer he has the gift, which seems both wholly natural and yet to go with a very conscious discipline and decorum, of putting the reader calmly inside his world in his first few ...”

“... citizen, described by Robert Fagles as ‘arguably the finest Classicist of our day’, by Peter Green as one his nation ‘ought to bronze’, and by Jasper Griffin as a man ‘one would like to have as a friend’. In his long career he has written on many subjects: scholarly articles on the heroes of Attic drama in its golden age, unsentimental ...”

“... the first anything – unstudied, unelaborated, untouched by rules.’ That would be horribly like Peter Pan if it were not for the slyness in the sweetness. It shows how crafty the most ‘spontaneous’ art invariably is – if it succeeds as art. At the same time Whitman’s jottings and MS do reveal more disturbed and even distracted feelings and ...”

“... She married a young Air Force officer, and became, in her twenties, an important personality in Washington society. Her main male friend outside her collapsing marriage was the Ambassador in Washington of the new Fascist regime in Italy, Prince Gelasio Caetani, an attractive and powerful propagandist for Mussolini. While ...”

“... painted for the Hospital of Charity of Seville and now to be seen in the National Gallery, Washington. Brown goes so far as to claim that the later 17th century was the real golden age within the golden age of Spanish painting, despite the economic problems of the time. These problems have their place in the story, for the author offers his readers ...”

“... Then in December 1940, on the unexpected death of Lord Lothian, the British ambassador in Washington, Churchill asked Lloyd George to take his place. He thought about it, declined and allowed his last few years to peter out; he accepted a hereditary earldom and, his wife having died, at last married Frances ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Henry Kissinger, in his memoir Years of Upheaval, phrased it even more prettily: ‘Hanoi and Washington had inflicted grievous wounds on each other; theirs were physical, ours psychological and thus perhaps harder to heal.’ This connects perfectly to the sickly fashion for therapy and esteem which it partially prefigures, and to the essentially ...”

“... the UN headman in Kabul, a well-meaning, but not very bright Norwegian, fell out with his deputy, Peter Galbraith, who as the de facto representative of the US State Department had decreed that President Karzai’s election was rigged and went public about it. His superior continued to defend Hamid Karzai’s legitimacy. Astonishingly, the UN then fired ...”

“... film’s Canadian-Israeli producer, 80 per cent of the money came from the executive producer ‘Peter Mier’, but that’s just an alias, as is the name of the film’s production manager, ‘Brett Halperin’. Shore claims ‘Mier’ and ‘Halperin’, whoever they are, are simply taking precautions, though it isn’t clear against what. The danger ...”

“... in republican America than it has ever been in Britain, at the Belasco on West 44th, with Denzel Washington as Brutus. Just as in Forrest’s day, many of the audience talked unabashedly whenever their hero was absent from the stage, though given the standard of what was very much a supporting cast, this didn’t seem as inappropriate as it might have ...”

“... candidacy tend to ignore policy matters, focusing instead on her gender and her twenty years as a Washington insider. Many usually thoughtful people can find nothing more substantial to say in her favour than ‘it’s her turn.’ This points to the problem with identity politics: it suggests that this woman deserves the presidency because she has paid her ...”

“... as the ‘returnees’ were transported to Algeria, then to Germany, then to West Point, to Washington, and then at last to their various home towns; most American newspapers and national weeklies ran supplements on the return, ranging from learned analyses of how the final agreement between Iran and the United States was arrived at, and what it ...”