“... and his long personal acquaintance with the United States, he could discuss Community business in Washington with authority and hope of influence. But the politics of the Community would remain frustrating. It was as if Low’s famous TUC carthorse had lumbered across the Channel and was now harnessed to the European ideal. Roy Jenkins had one important ...”

“... more mutually supportive. It was not that the British were unaware of the dangers of this. Sir John Troutbeck, one of the two Ambassadors of the Fifties examined in the chapter by William Roger Louis, was outspokenly crit ical of the immense social gaps, and in his view Western education had only made the younger generation of Iraqis more narrow-minded ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... National Endowment for the Humanities, has condemned the plan because, among other things, George Washington is mentioned less frequently than Harriet Tubman, who led groups of slaves to freedom before the Civil War. Ms Cheney seems not to appreciate the difference between a set of curricular guidelines and a textbook. Topics mandated under the new ...”

“... 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 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... he moonlighted as a talent-spotter for his old deputy.Angleton took Matthiessen on a drive around Washington and told him that Paris was a plum assignment. Until then Matthiessen hadn’t realised he’d been hired. Three months of stateside training would be necessary. Matthiessen baulked at coming down to ...”

“... 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 ...”