“... She knows Dickens well enough to lift a chunk of Bleak House and change foggy London into foggy Washington. But her borrowing is intelligent, because she sees into Dickens’s metaphor. Here are two nations, two cities, suffocating in the fog of irrationality and injustice, where the law and its servants and its victims swim in a miasma of oppression. And ...”

“... typewriters. When he died, Wilson was learning Hungarian, part of a new investigative project. John Wain tells how he went to see him and asked him casually what had happened to the Indians round his up-state New York home. Wilson was ashamed that he could not answer the question, investigated it, and produced his book Apologies to the Iroquois. For ...”

“... in East Anglia. After his enthusiasm for this sort of thing came to light, the Sun contacted John Hanson, one of the book’s authors, who declared that ‘any sensible person’ would be interested in a phenomenon ‘that has baffled mankind for millennia’.The extent to which Philip was a sensible person remains open to debate, but as a UFO buff who ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 1982 should have been 15 percentage points higher than it was. Thatcher’s government, and later John Major’s, experimented with various other methods for containing inflation. In 1988, Thatcher’s second chancellor, Nigel Lawson, proposed making the Bank of England independent and tasking it with keeping down inflation, the path New Labour took when it ...”