“... style’, and whole new lines of children’s toys appeared glor-ifying the Boers and ridiculing John Bull. Even the pacifist Tolstoy was caught up in the wild enthusiasm for the war: ‘You know what point I’ve reached? Opening a paper every morning I passionately wish to read that the Boers have beaten the British.’ He knew that he ‘should not ...”

“... puzzling about this, I received a phone call from Tony Lanyi, one-time Harvard room-mate, now a Washington economist, and a close friend. He had called to persuade me to go, if that was needed. He said he had just been back to a class reunion at his high school in Oberlin, Ohio. Working-class and college graduate, it had been quite a mix, though he guessed ...”

“... to perhaps 55,000 Americans. The economy was crippled, and the years of an embargo imposed by Washington have hamstrung recovery. An official of the Foreign Ministry told me in Hanoi last year: ‘We have changed our attitude. The Americans dropped so many bombs – as we say, enough for everyone to have a crater on each shoulder. But now we want ...”

“... telephoned by President Kennedy and asked to calculate how many Cuban cigars there were in all of Washington. He replied that he didn’t know, but could discover how many cigar stores there were. ‘Well, go to all of them, Pierre, and buy every Havana they’ve got.’ The mystified underling completed his task, and only learned its meaning later that ...”

“... of papers and a bag of the breadcrumbs with which he feeds a particular flock of pigeons in Washington Square. He knows the birds by name: Big Bosom, Lady Astor, St John the Baptist, Polly Adler, Fiorello. He wanders from saloon to saloon cadging beers, sandwiches and cash. Most important, he adds to his ...”

“... complete set of original furnishings, crystal flowers, cellophane curtains and a shrine to George Washington (‘He is the only man I collect’). Like much of her work, her interior design was grand in concept and technically complex but didn’t take itself too seriously. She conjured a European aristocratic past out of flashy, ersatz materials and ...”

“... did not appear until 1837 and was quickly supplanted by two popularising and very popular works, John Forster’s The Life and Adventures of Oliver Goldsmith (1848) and Washington Irving’s Life of Oliver Goldsmith (1849). Forster and Irving built on Prior’s research to reinstate – affectionately, but still damagingly ...”

“... awe at the force of nature they served. He was struck by the fact that the pinnacles of power in Washington were occupied by old and often lonely men: the single, childless House Speaker, Sam Rayburn (Texas); many of the old Southern bulls who ruled the Senate, especially Richard Russell (Georgia), their unchallenged chief; even the President. Eleanor ...”

“... generations of artists, architects and scholars have represented the city. Bender begins in Washington Square, reminding us that the vibrant public park of today’s Greenwich Village ‘was born in death’, serving as a potter’s field for the indigent and criminal classes between the cholera epidemic of 1798 and 1828, when the Square officially ...”

“... champagne and brandy . . . to incapacitate any lesser man’, as his private secretary John Colville put it. He would talk to ministers with Toby, his budgie, alighting (and sometimes doing more than that) on their heads. He had frequent sleeps. His method of dealing with crises, he explained, was to ‘turn out the light, say “bugger ...”

“... start again on a new page: in Hunting Mister Heartbreak (1990), Raban adopts a different identity (John Rayburn, Rainbird) for each place he visits. In Waxwings, set in the ‘virtual city’ of Seattle at the height of the dot.com boom, American reality bites back. A professor’s bookish enthusiasm for the ‘Jeffersonian ideal of life, liberty and the ...”

“... and furious hummingbirds, to hear Walcott speak with such affection about Edward Thomas and John Clare; odd to follow his gaze out to sea and hear him quote Walter de la Mare’s ‘Fare Well’ with its intimations of an English pastoral afterlife. When at the party Glyn Maxwell, or perhaps it was Paul Farley, asked him what it was to be a ...”

“... sentenced to death. All this has happened with the support of the West: the US secretary of state, John Kerry, recently handed over half a billion dollars to the Sisi regime. And the situation in Syria has led some to wonder whether, compared to the jihadis, Assad might after all be the best option. The West would be more than tempted to back any suitable ...”

“... simply imperial overstretch and war-weariness? That seems a little thin, given the hue and cry in Washington about ‘ungoverned spaces’ and ‘terrorist safe havens’. After all, the Sahara is six times as big as Afghanistan and Pakistan combined. And why sink money into the Trans-Sahara Counterterrorism Partnership – more than $1 billion since 2005 ...”

“... as there was to the numerical patterns that Russell Crowe’s character, the mathematician John Nash, saw in magazine articles and Dow Jones reports in A Beautiful Mind. Nash in his illness started seeing the patterns and the threats they conveyed everywhere. He had no reality check, no filter and no way of ordering priorities. Like the American ...”