“... in republican America than it has ever been in Britain, at the Belasco on West 44th, with Denzel Washington as Brutus. Just as in Forrest’s day, many of the audience talked unabashedly whenever their hero was absent from the stage, though given the standard of what was very much a supporting cast, this didn’t seem as inappropriate as it might have ...”

“... blind but don’t worry: It’s just your eyes are full of ice-cold curry. Schmidt goes to Washington and tells the Yanks That while his Germany might still be Jerry The Russians are not Tom and have large tanks Whose side-effects it can take weeks to bury. Therefore he is reluctant to give thanks For Reagan’s speeches, which to him seem very ...”

“... as the ‘hallowed ground’ of the victims. Can mercantile New York be crossed with mausoleal Washington, say, or the World Trade Center be turned into the World Trauma Center? Should it be?The presentations in December made for terrific theatre: two parts The Fountainhead, one part Gangs of New York. On the one hand, the willingness of prestigious ...”

“... candidacy tend to ignore policy matters, focusing instead on her gender and her twenty years as a Washington insider. Many usually thoughtful people can find nothing more substantial to say in her favour than ‘it’s her turn.’ This points to the problem with identity politics: it suggests that this woman deserves the presidency because she has paid her ...”

“... as the ‘returnees’ were transported to Algeria, then to Germany, then to West Point, to Washington, and then at last to their various home towns; most American newspapers and national weeklies ran supplements on the return, ranging from learned analyses of how the final agreement between Iran and the United States was arrived at, and what it ...”

“... Third Programme in 1950 for a professional performance by the Schola Polyphonica directed by Henry Washington and was sung at the funeral of the composer Manuel de Falla in Cádiz Cathedral in January 1947. Something of the atmosphere that had by now attached itself to the work was expressed by Juan María Thomas, who conducted it on that occasion: ‘We ...”

“... as Greeks in a new Roman Empire suggested that this empire might purport to be governed from Washington but that the timeless wisdom of Downing Street would be constantly available on the hotline. But who was kidding whom? It is no surprise that the Suez crisis revealed Macmillan simultaneously at his worst and his best. First the bad news, which was for ...”

“... only so much damage one can do with a Robert Frost interview, but that didn’t stop the late Peter Matthiessen, one of the founding editors, from now and then leaving the office, or the Himalayas, to spy on supposed enemies of the United States. Matthiessen later said he had used the magazine as cover for some high-level snitching, but in the annals of ...”

“... knowledge’ to work for counter-insurgency operations in Afghanistan, Iraq and elsewhere. Peter Mandler wants to rescue Mead. His book portrays her as one of the more sympathetic US internationalists. First, she got Americans interested in the far corners of the globe in the early 1940s when, in Mandler’s view, many were inclined to turn their ...”

“... system led not only to unnecessary delay but also to unsatisfactory compromises.In Cabinet (1986) Peter Hennessy records that, under Mrs Thatcher, ‘cabinet does meet less frequently, it discusses fewer formal papers, it is presented with more virtual faits accomplis at the last moment, and she does prefer to work in ad hoc groups – many of the most ...”

“... Republican leadership. Then, in November 1989, the new Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, Peter Brooke, publicly admitted that it was ‘difficult to envisage the military defeat’ of a force such as the IRA ‘because of the circumstances under which they operate’ and that if a political debate were to ‘start within the terrorist ...”

“... rest of the 1980s there was continuing tension between London and Tel Aviv, and between London and Washington. Thatcher subscribed to the Venice Declaration, which called for a Palestinian state and proposed a role for the PLO. In June 1981, Israeli aircraft bombed the Iraqi nuclear reactor at Osirak, on what proved to be the spurious grounds that it was ...”

“... motel developer, who died in 1994. Sante and Kenneth had form. Their photo had appeared in the Washington Post in the early 1970s, when they gatecrashed a party attended by Vice-President Ford – part of a scam to do with the selling of posters to schools. They’d been tried in 1986 for imprisoning servants and refusing to pay them (she got three ...”

“... kind of story, this – not just a routine flight from Orlando but a special flight from Washington DC, as it were, with the President on board. The man from the Pru is still right to think that if it hadn’t been this passenger, in this fatal predicament, it would in all likelihood have been someone else, somewhere else. There is still plenty of ...”

“... of low expectations’. ‘Bush’s conversational storytelling makes for engaging reading,’ Peter Baker writes in the New York Times. ‘It’s folksy, sharply observed and surprisingly affecting,’ Michiko Kakutani says in the same paper. ‘A helluva good read,’ Douglas Brinkley writes in the Financial Times. ‘Bush Jr’s new memoir doesn’t ...”