“... the western half of the city, gutting, looting and burning as they went. Jonathan Randal of the Washington Post, the only one of us to see the inevitability of civil war, evacuated the Saint Georges to take refuge in our new press corps HQ, the Hotel Commodore. Another Commodore arrival was Rob Warden of the Chicago Daily News, rescued from the Palm Beach ...”

“... to Stockbridge ‘after the Revolution’, and who was a friend of Alexander Hamilton and George Washington. His descendants (but not, importantly, all of them) are buried, in ‘the Pie’, with their heads facing out and their feet pointing in, towards their ancestor. The legend is, apparently, that on Judgment Day the Sedgwicks will arise together, en ...”

“... Hersh wrote, ‘By the summer of 1970, the secret life of Henry Kissinger was known throughout the Washington press corps,’ I sat up hopefully in bed, but no, he meant Kissinger’s secret professional life as ‘the senior White House official’ who briefed reporters and gave off-the-record interviews. Mr Hersh does not even allow himself to speculate ...”

“... her to West Germany. She takes as her motif the startling quotation from the Revelations of St John: ‘And the third angel sounded, and there fell a great star from heaven, burning as it were a lamp, and it fell upon the third part of the rivers, and upon the fountains of waters; And the name of the star is called Wormwood: and the third part of the ...”

“... exists in two versions, one now in the Whitney Museum, the other in the National Gallery of Art in Washington. The photograph also survives, guarding its own pathos and dim beauty. All three show him as a boy with smooth hair and a neat coat, holding a small bouquet in well-articulated fingers. He is standing next to his seated mother, who wears an enveloping ...”

“... who early in his career restaged great watery history paintings – The Raft of the ‘Medusa’, Washington Crossing the Delaware – as surfing scenes, has long been picking California’s allegorical crops. A Southern California surfer himself, he once painted a brilliant series – In Smog and Thunder: Historical Works from the Great War of the ...”

“... over to the monks of Ampleforth to be crammed, successfully, for a history scholarship to Oxford. John Peet ended up as head of the Reuters bureau in Berlin, before defecting to the East in 1950. Gavin Ewart, whose poems now seem the high-spot of Out of Bounds, went to Cambridge with an exhibition to read classics; he left Wellington with some farewell verses ...”

“... his first book, from 1958, and republished it in 2001, with an introduction by his friend John Ashbery.* Schuyler is first and last a poet, but the other books shed interesting light on the poetry. ‘For readers of his poetry, the idea of the Diary of James Schuyler might almost seem like too much of a good thing,’ begins Nathan Kernan’s ...”

“... a ‘hero image of Castro, in which all the virtues of Robin Hood and Thomas Jefferson, of George Washington and Abraham Lincoln, were contained in a single man’. Matthews’s series caused an uproar in Cuba: Batista himself was enraged by it, and one of his top advisers dismissed Matthews’s reporting as ‘a chapter in a fantastic ...”

“... Local and state governments aided and abetted the intruders, but at first officials in Washington sided with the Native Americans, who had signed treaties with the federal government that ceded much of their land but guaranteed ownership of the rest in perpetuity. Even President Andrew Jackson, whose career, Cowie writes, revealed a ‘merciless ...”

“... home: Philby in Ambala, India, son of the eccentric explorer of Arabia (and Ford motor agent) St John Philby; Sorge in Baku, Russia to a German petroleum engineer and his Russian wife, the daughter of a prosperous capitalist from Kiev. Politically, Sorge’s lineage was even more exotic than Philby’s: while his father was a staunch subject of the ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... a wallpaper brush. I go to an uninformative briefing with my new friends in the RAF. Group Captain John Fynes says: ‘I’ve been told I’m not to lie to you.’ I ask if this is a new policy.28 February. I am due to have lunch with Entisar, an Iraqi woman living in Kuwait I met when I was here a few weeks ago. She thinks I look like Tony Blair, which I do ...”

“... 1949. He took well to the re-establishment of relations with the US and led a party delegation to Washington in 1980. But his later political career points more to a commitment to party discipline than to any reformist conviction. After his stint in Guangdong, he was elected to the Politburo and was again put in charge of dealing with Tibet and ...”