“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... it’s Auden who has ‘disappeared in the dead of winter’ and is now to be found in the George Washington Hotel on 23rd Street and Lexington Avenue. It is Auden who is freezing, having recently arrived in a city where it was snowing (their ship looked like ‘a wedding cake’, Isherwood noted). It is Auden, too, who is refusing to do anything poetic with ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Their artistic and romantic partnership would last until 1961; the company they kept included John Cage and Merce Cunningham. In this heady atmosphere, Johns chose, in autumn 1954, to destroy all his prior work, and to begin the paintings that made his name when they were shown four years later: flags, targets and numbers crafted in encaustic (pigment ...”

“... America), this time in the company of Senor Greene: the couple of swell writers were smuggled into Washington by General Torrijos, then the President of Panama. The merriment becomes general too when the author of The Autumn of the Patriarch recalls how Torrijos even tried to disguise the author of The Power and the Glory as a Panamanian colonel! Devised by a ...”