“... 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 ...”

“... agitation against the Corn Laws in the early 1840s, the movement’s leaders, Richard Cobden and John Bright, gave encouragement to a proposal by a young Scotsman, James Wilson, to set up a weekly newspaper that would argue for the cause of free trade. But Wilson had no intention of being a mouthpiece for the Anti-Corn Law League, insisting that his paper ...”

“... improbable scenario came to pass earlier this year and on 9 July, the SPLA commander in chief, John Garang, flew to Khartoum to be sworn in as vice president. Garang died in a helicopter crash only 22 days later but his successor, Salva Kiir, is likely to consummate the peace deal. But even if Sudan returns to war, it will not be a renewed jihad aimed at ...”

“... di People’s Election Special rolling off a thirty-year-old Heidelberg printing machine at the John Love Press, a small works where the centre-spread of an eight-page edition was already flouncing onto the delivery table. (This little engine-room of populist exasperation was another non-Kaplan place.) Paul Kamara, one of the paper’s editors, drove down a ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”