“... is not one of substance, but one of timing. The formulation by Madison, Alexander Hamilton and John Jay of an intellectual defence of the new American system of representative government came at the end of the revolutionary process, and in the aftermath of the drawing up of a new Constitution. Sieyès set out the core of his ideas at the very beginning of ...”

“... sat so Martin could walk; Martin walked so Obama could run; Obama is running so we all can fly!’ John McCain, hapless Republican candidate in 2008, charged that his rival was a lightweight international ‘celebrity’, like Britney Spears. To many white liberals, however, Obama seemed to guarantee instant redemption from the crimes of a democracy built on ...”

“... opposition. (This advantage was to be rammed home the following year when Kinnock paid a trip to Washington and Reagan’s team humiliated him – allocating him just 25 minutes of the president’s time and then ending the meeting five minutes early – to keep Maggie sweet.) Thatcher secured an invitation to Camp David, where she intended to remind Reagan ...”

“... quality – a little like Weegee’s – at once random and composed. In one, the circus director John Ringling North dominates the right half of the frame, shouting instructions to an unseen person, while above and to the left a high-wire act has two showgirls suspended from the wheels of a bicycle: the picture frame is divided by a balancing bar carried by ...”

“... start of the operation to ask what they thought its legacy would be. Not one – not Labour’s John Reid, now Baron Reid of Cardowan, or Des Browne, now Baron Browne of Ladyton, or John Hutton, now Baron Hutton of Furness, or Bob Ainsworth, or the Conservatives’ Philip Hammond or Liam Fox – was prepared to ...”

“... cool luminous reportage that reminds one of the work of our more storied essayists, Joan Didion or John McPhee. In the past few years the incidence of these big books has increased rapidly: three years ago, Christopher Bram published his Washington tale, Almost History; in 1994, Laura Argiri’s 19th-century melodrama The ...”

“... would have come out just fine. But only a few adventurous souls, and only one reputable economist, John Maynard Keynes, dared to contradict what seemed to be common sense, and even they were hesitant. The central bankers, by contrast, were utterly certain that they were right, just as they are now; and they gave exactly the same advice they are giving now; the ...”

“... Robert Megaw was shot when his patrol was ambushed in Edward Street in Lurgan. And Constable John Forsyth was blown up in Market Street on 18 June 1974. There have been many others. The RUC is currently 93 per cent Protestant. The action of Loyalist informers and double agents in Northern Ireland has often involved them in liaising between the Loyalist ...”

“... Non-Aligned Movement; Lee mugged for the cameras with Nehru, Nkrumah and Tito. He openly mocked Washington’s incompetent imperialism in Vietnam, holding to ransom a CIA agent who had spied on his party, and flirting with the idea of a Soviet naval base, before abruptly reversing gears, taking a series of sabbaticals in the Harvard Kennedy School (which ...”

“... 2005 papal conclave, when he was the main contender against Joseph Ratzinger after the death of John Paul II. It centred on the arrest and torture of two Jesuit priests, Oswaldo Yorio and Franz Jalics. Bergoglio had known both of them since the early 1960s – they had been his teachers. By the time Bergoglio took over as provincial of Argentina and ...”

“... raging sex-obsessed Jew uses bad words in a book, and suddenly in 1969 it is described in the Washington Post as ‘the most important book of my generation’? Portnoy’s Complaint has a passage about the stand-up comedy that is so obviously one of the sources of the book’s vitality: ‘That’s who the black humorists are – of course! – the Henny ...”

“... Arthur Goldberg and many others, and by sundry American newspapers and periodicals, including the Washington Post, Commentary and the New Republic. On the other hand, Norman Finkelstein has described the book as one ‘of the most spectacular frauds ever published on the Arab-Israeli conflict’, and in the Nation Alexander Cockburn has called it ‘From Lies ...”

“... vestry a dusty reproduction of Botticelli’s Mother and Child from the National Gallery of Art in Washington. It’s shielding a hole in the plaster and has an old label stuck on it: ‘From Professor Joad. BBC’. 11 April, Wandsworth. What strikes you about a prison is not that it’s unlike any other place you’ve ever been in, but that it’s quite like ...”

“... won admirers among the black writers who emerged during the Black Power era, such as LeRoi Jones, John A. Williams and Ishmael Reed. And his legacy now? As Jackson writes, ‘history has borne out some of his vinegary judgments.’ Today, Himes’s belief in the implacable force of white supremacism – what is now called Afro-pessimism – enjoys a growing ...”

“... though for me it spoils the ‘line’ of the poem – was reinstated at the petitioning of John Berryman in For the Union Dead (1964); a revised version of that is printed as a separate poem called ‘Ovid and Caesar’s Daughter’ in History (1973); and now Bidart and Gewanter have unearthed a seven-stanza monster that was printed in the Kenyon ...”