“... In another life, Rhodes might have made a living as an astrologer. Is there anyone working in Washington politics who couldn’t see something of themselves in that description? As their working relationship evolves, Rhodes comes to appreciate that Obama does not in fact see things the way he does. How could he, given where he has come from? As an African ...”

“... of norms and expectations that helped assure continuity between different administrations in Washington by introducing ‘greater discipline’ into American foreign policy, Nye and Keohane’s study left no doubt about the pay-off for Washington. ‘Regimes usually are in America’s interest because the United States ...”

“... families of their donors), and it would soon give rise to a distinct interior aesthetic. Just as John Fowler, who would become the Trust’s favoured ‘decorator’ in the late Fifties, scorned the idea of ‘design’, James Lees-Milne distinguished the true country-house interior from the ‘contrived “old world” flavour’ of an architect like ...”

“... York Daily News in the mid-Eighties, ‘Larry Schiller makes Baron von Munchausen look like George Washington.’ Yet at the beginning of this new book there is an appreciation: ‘to Larry Schiller, my skilled and wily colleague in interview and investigation, for the six months we laboured side by side in Minsk and Moscow, and then again in Dallas, feeling ...”

“... their audience had been anticipating. A few days earlier, Christopher had cooked Peter supper in Washington, ‘a domesticated action so unexpected that I still haven’t got over it … If he is going to take up roasting legs of lamb at this stage of his life, then what else might be possible?’ Christopher, it seems, no longer makes Peter angry. He just ...”

“... the gym for no good reason or an effeminate classmate or two. I’d looked through books like John Rechy’s City of Night that my brother had lying around. It was mostly about low-life, pathetic guys jerking each other off in Times Square movie houses, near as I could tell. If my brother was queer, I thought, there was no doubt a lot more to it than ...”

“... globally – a big if – we will before long be able to trade carbon anywhere in the world. As John Lanchester noted in the last issue of the LRB, the science of global warming is not straightforward. The basic physics has been clear since the 19th century. What’s been harder to understand in detail are matters such as the many feedback loops by which a ...”

“... was to be socially as well as musically discordant; it is no accident that the primary business of John Stark, publisher of Scott Joplin’s most famous rags, was the selling of pianos. The arrival of the cheap domestic piano hastened the decline of field songs and ‘spirituals’ among former slaves, but by and large failed to establish a pious white ...”

“... In the movie, however, it provides the occasion for one of Hollywood’s happy endings, in which John Quincy Adams moves the Supreme Court to a recognition of human rights by eloquently invoking the Declaration of Independence. Unfortunately, this never happened. The justices did, indeed, send the Africans home, but their decision turned on maritime law and ...”

“... of their Afghan adventure, Bush showed no interest in filling the vacuum left behind. As far as Washington was concerned, the struggle for Afghanistan was over. ‘We won,’ the CIA station chief in Islamabad cabled headquarters. In this interval of confusion, Saddam Hussein rode to Washington’s rescue, giving new ...”

“... to cover the language as it is written and spoken throughout the world.’ At a symposium in Washington in 1986 Burchfield asserted that ‘for the most part Murray preferred to fend off overseas words until they had become firmly entrenched in British use.’ Burchfield wanted people to understand that on his watch the OED had broken with his ...”

“... vicious ambiguity: what was done to her? Or, what has she done to herself? After Colin Dexter and John Thaw’s Inspector Morse, Ian Rankin’s Rebus and Helen Mirren’s Jane Tennison in Prime Suspect, Rachel raises the tradition of the alcoholic detective to a new level. The novel’s main protagonist spends most of her time on train journeys, with no ...”

“... of those in the government have tended to harden. A few weeks after the attacks on New York and Washington in 2001, Tony Blair told the Labour Party conference that people should keep in mind the common values of Jews, Muslims and Christians. ‘The true followers of Islam are our brothers and sisters in this struggle,’ he said. ‘Bin Laden is no more ...”

“... State Prison, near San Francisco; he had expected a five-dollar birthday cheque from an aunt in Washington and been advanced a box of Camels by Billy Oberholster, the biggest of the prison’s lenders, with the promise of the cheque as surety. Juleson smokes his cigarettes, but the cheque never arrives: ‘You fool, you fool, he told himself . . . his aunt ...”

“... what took place at Beijing airport on Monday, 21 February 1972. It’s also the opening scene of John Adams’s opera Nixon in China, premiered in Houston in 1987, and staged again at the London Coliseum over a few evenings last summer. An actual occurrence then, but also, as Adams and his librettist Alice Coleman understood, a brightly lit performance with ...”