“... and international opposition. More important, however, was the weakness of the British economy and Washington’s determination to undermine the pound if the invasion went ahead. In 1989 Washington’s indifference to UN protests against its actions showed how the value put on such pressure had declined in the intervening ...”

“... who, although never accorded the place in popular memory enjoyed by his contemporaries, George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, fathered the Constitution and offered the most compelling rationale for ratification. More than any other figure, Madison inspired the movement to replace the Articles of Confederation, the previous frame of government, with a ...”

“... and fiscal autonomy lay the desire to deal with the Native Americans without interference: George Washington is described archly as ‘the castigator of the Native Americans’. When the war ended, with the settlers as victors, one of their generals said with satisfaction that ‘we … can dispose of the lands as we think proper or most convenient to ...”

“... of the information that War and Peace contains. Even novels in which almost nothing happens – John McGahern’s, for instance – will speak in historical whispers, aiming to ‘disimprison’, as Coleridge once said, ‘the soul of fact’. Beryl Bainbridge was one of the last of the pre-Google English novelists, the last, you might say, following ...”

“... in Fallujah are becoming more confident. In one attack in February they almost killed General John Abizaid, the US Middle East commander, and in another they overran the police headquarters, killing some twenty men. The soldiers in the specialised units of the 82nd Airborne Division sound a little perplexed by the sort of war they are fighting. At a base ...”

“... and 80 per cent of women could in theory be sent to prison for sexual malpractice (as it were). Washington Confidential used Kinsey’s national averages to infer that 21 congressmen were gay and 192 other politicians were ‘bad behaviour risks’, which was perhaps what stirred Congressman B. Carroll Reece to attack the Rockefeller Foundation for funding ...”

“... recycled lancet before draining as much as four pints into a basin or basins. In 1799 George Washington was relieved of nine pints of blood within 24 hours; he died shortly afterwards. In The Old Venetian Bleeding Glass, a late 19th-century paean to this vanishing tradition of extravagance, John Freeman Knott, a Dublin ...”

“... congressional tally of results on 6 January 2021. Here the rainmaker in Trump’s entourage was John Eastman, as it happens a former student of Lessig’s at the University of Chicago, where he was in the same class as the anti-Trump Republican Liz Cheney. Eastman’s feeble argument – that Vice President Mike Pence was empowered to overturn Democratic ...”

“... thought he’d met a medieval saint.Shortly after the liberation, Enrico Scaretti was sent to Washington by the Italian government to describe the state of the economy to the Americans. ‘A Bell for Italy’ was the title he gave his report, after John Hersey’s 1944 novel set in war-torn Sicily, A Bell for Adano. He ...”

“... engine types, guidance systems and fuel consumption. In 1950, Eisenhower’s secretary of state, John Foster Dulles, had explained the inevitability of federation in terms that every adult Eritrean can retrieve, more or less correctly, from somewhere in the mental files: ‘From the point of view of justice, the opinions of the Eritrean people must receive ...”

“... all the more sweeping because back in England the pattern of land ownership was still very varied. John Darby’s huge estate map of Smallburgh, Norfolk, dated a year before Gilbert set sail and now in the British Library, shows a rich mixture of strip-fields, commons and orchards, as well as the large number of fields already enclosed by the landowner and ...”

“... of the incarceration, first in a US military detention centre resembling Guantánamo, then in a Washington facility for the insane; the lasting damage done to people in his family circle; the powerful egocentrism at the heart of all this: the most dire aspects of Pound’s history trouble the reader. Yet Pound’s life is also one of the greatest stories of ...”

“... was unambiguous: Darfur was the site of an ongoing genocide. The chain of events leading to Washington’s proclamation began with ‘a genocide alert’ from the Management Committee of the Washington Holocaust Memorial Museum; according to the Jerusalem Post, the alert was ‘the first ever of its kind, issued by ...”

“... of its offices: ‘At this location, 122 Commerce Street, was a very large warehouse owned by John Murphey, who provided support to the slave traders in the city.’ ‘I would have preferred not to have the additional markers,’ the mayor confessed, ‘but I believe they are part of history.’ He agreed to allow them, he said, because they would ...”

“... Arizona in 2010 and should have left in September: the redeployment is on hold. A move is afoot in Washington to increase Border Patrol staff, now roughly 20,000, by a further 5000 in the next four years and to deploy 6000 National Guard along the length of the frontier. The bill is sponsored by John McCain ...”