“... to the US. As fluent in Ayn Rand as he was in English, Netanyahu flourished in Reagan’s Washington, where laissez-faire economics and Revisionist Zionism were the twin pillars of right-wing think tanks like the American Enterprise Institute and the Heritage Foundation. He rehearsed for interviews in front of video cameras, and learned to ‘keep his ...”

“... for class insecurity. This underdog cockiness persisted for decades, serving as the driver of John Travolta’s sidewalk strut in 1977’s Saturday Night Fever, where disco prince Tony Manero eventually tires of Bay Ridge Brooklyn and his mooky friends as the magic spires of Manhattan beckon. A product of the jukebox era, Podhoretz belonged to an older ...”

“... because of her interest in folklore and her knowledge of the area around Coole and its people. ‘John Synge, I and Augusta Gregory, thought/All that we did, all that we said or sang/Must come from contact with the soil.’ Much of Yeats’s work on Irish folklore was, as Foster points out, a collaboration with Lady Gregory.Lady Gregory also wrote ...”

“... proprietary rights over territories ‘lost’ by incompetent Presidents or neglectful officials. John Stempel’s book Inside the Iranian Revolution exemplifies this attitude. As Deputy Chief of the Political Section of the US Embassy, Stempel served in Tehran during the critical years from 1975 to mid-1979, after the fall of the Shah, when most of the ...”

“... Lover’, ‘Hill of the Bees’, ‘A Myth Enacted’, ‘Slow Bell from the High Hill’, ‘John Hunter’s Canal’, ‘The Lawn of Trees and Rocks’, ‘Quelle Histoire’, and (an unusual exertion of sympathy) ‘Dulled Son of Man’. In a poem to Ivor Gurney, Grigson, who can sometimes be magnanimous to the dead, hails Gurney as a poet of ...”

“... and security, that we can recognise how weird those years really were. The importance of John Lewis Gaddis’s book is that it is the first coherent and sustained attempt to write the Cold War’s history since it ended. That alone makes it hard to resist, but it is also wise and imaginative and written in a vigorous, simple English which is a ...”

“... which led some to gravitate toward the fringes of American society both left and right. John Rambo, for his part, did both. In First Blood (1982), Sylvester Stallone’s character is a ‘half-German, half-Indian’ veteran, traumatised by the war, who arrives in a small town to pay his respects to a black comrade killed by exposure to Agent ...”

“... with deciding whether to set aside CA3 when the matter was already a fait accompli, and those in Washington who had decided to bin it then pinned responsibility for doing so on Guantánamo. Sands lays out a detailed exposé of the legal advice which led Bush to announce in February 2002 that Geneva didn’t cover either Gitmo’s al-Qaida or its Taliban ...”

“... on behalf of the United States in 1997. A few days later, he bluntly defended his decision at a Washington press conference: ‘I will not accept a plan that will harm our economy and hurt American workers … first things first are the people who live in America; that’s my priority.’ Bush’s abrupt decision to back out of an agreement already made by ...”

“... November 1988, Paul Ingram, a police officer, was arrested by colleagues in his office in Olympia, Washington State. His daughters, Ericka and Julie, had accused him of sexual molestation. Ingram made no attempt to deny the charges. He couldn’t remember doing anything, but he said: ‘My girls know me. They wouldn’t lie about something like this.’ He ...”

“... demand for Concorde. London-Bahrain? No. Melbourne-Singapore? No. A two-hop service from London to Washington to Dallas, in association with the Texan airline Braniff? Maybe, but Braniff went bust. Even on the core route from London to New York, income from ticket sales never came close to covering operating costs.Then in February 1981 Sir ...”

“... through anxiety and depression. Most mornings, the car that took him from his home in St John’s Wood to the Observer offices near Fleet Street would divert to Sigmund Freud’s old house in Maresfield Gardens, Hampstead, where Freud’s daughter Anna still saw patients. There, Astor would spend a daily analytic hour on the couch attempting to ...”

“... thoughts against thoughts in groans grind. For too long, Bishop had lived these moral choices of life/death, right/wrong, male/female: but at last, the early happy years with Lota had made them seem irrelevant, and Bishop, longing for Paradise since her blighted childhood, felt she had found it at Santarém: That golden evening I really wanted to go no farther; more than anything else I wanted to stay awhile in that conflux of two great rivers ...”

“... He provides the new, as the old, Chronicle with its unforgettable opening tableau in March 1948: Washington D.C. Arriving at the Raleigh Hotel for my appointment with Stravinsky this morning, I find Auden pacing the lobby – in the same suit he wore in a photograph taken a decade ago in China. ‘The night train from Pittsburgh was late,’ he says, ‘and ...”

“... Quite recently Lucius Quinctius had been popular in America, too. True, it had taken George Washington more than two weeks on the job, and he had not exactly returned to the plough. But he did not make himself into a bloodthirsty despot either, or set up in the throne business against George III. Hence classical retrospect had emerged fortified by the ...”