“... a solemn and respectful visit to Gore Vidal’s grave. It is to be found in Rock Creek Cemetery in Washington. You take a few paces down the slope from the graveyard’s centrepiece, which is the lachrymose and androgynous Mourning Figure sculpted by August St Guldens for Henry Adams’s unhappy wife Clover (whose name always puts me in mind of an overworked ...”

“... triad: excluding Russia, showing Britain the door and keeping Iran’s government tied directly to Washington. The British, long the dominant foreign power in Iran, had no intention of going quietly. Since the early years of the 20th century, Iran had been a de facto British protectorate: the Royal Navy was vital to the maintenance of imperial power, and the ...”

“... concerned with postwar Japan highly classified, in violation of its own laws. Most important, John Foster Dulles, President Truman’s special envoy to Japan charged with ending the occupation, wrote the peace treaty of 1951 in such a way that most former POWs and civilian victims of Japan are prevented from obtaining any form of compensation from either ...”

“... career. A third important KCIA Moonie was Sang Kil Han, who became military attaché at the Washington Embassy. All these young officers were fluent Anglophones, and major links in the tight CIA-KCIA nexus. All four are today to be found at the very summit of the Moonie movement. Bo Hi Pak heads the movement’s American press operation, News World ...”

“... On the evening of 11 April 1865, Abraham Lincoln spoke to a crowd in Washington about black suffrage. The Civil War had been over for a week. Lincoln had already walked the streets of Richmond, Virginia, the Confederate capital, taking in the devastation at first hand. ‘The only people who showed themselves were negroes,’ the radical senator Charles Sumner noted ...”

“... Maxim Litvinov, Soviet Commissar for Foreign Affairs in the Thirties and Stalin’s Ambassador to Washington after the war. John Carswell is the son of Catherine Carswell, who was Ivy’s best friend until she followed her husband to Russia in 1920. In 1959, after Catherine and Litvinov were dead, Ivy got permission to ...”

“... United States to provide diplomatic cover, especially in the United Nations. The key to keeping Washington on board is the Israel lobby, which pressures American leaders to side with Israel against the Palestinians and do hardly anything to stop the colonisation of the Occupied Territories. The second prong is Ze’ev Jabotinsky’s concept of the ‘Iron ...”

“... barnstorming election campaign. Florentyna is roused from subsequent torpor by an encounter on a Washington park bench with ‘Danny One Leg’. Her galvanised conscience dissipates any lingering widow’s melancholy. She throws herself into a welfare measure, eventually passed as the ‘Kane Bill’ which will restore every indigent American to full human ...”

“... Part Two, and to escape arrest he fled to France, accompanied by the Wykehamist gentleman-lawyer John Frost, described by Hitchens as secretary of the London Corresponding Society. The LCS was a society of radical artisans, not a gentleman’s club, and its secretary was in fact the shoemaker Thomas Hardy. The trial proceeded in Paine’s absence, and ...”

“... player not to contribute to Michael Charlton’s study, let it get buried. The Defence Secretary, John Nott, here speaks for the collective. ‘The Falkland Islands did not interest me,’ he tells Charlton. ‘I don’t think I would have really spent a lot of time mugging up my brief on matters surrounding the Falklands. I did not consider it to be of any ...”

“... and many other American colleges, and the public grounds at Niagara Falls, the US Capitol in Washington and, late in life, the 1893 World’s Fair in Chicago. It was a chance encounter at a seaside inn in New England that brought him to consider the notion of the great park in the first place, even if in retrospect he seems to have been the perfect ...”

“... were named after him and he was the recipient of mandatory encomia on official occasions. John Lewis Gaddis’s biography is a tombstone-sized tribute, based on unlimited access to its subject and his papers. Not bad for a mid-level policy planner whose most senior diplomatic postings were a brief ambassadorial appointment to Belgrade and an even ...”

“... if there was anything I could consciously do about it. Then I went from Syracuse, New York out to Washington State, with the intention of writing fiction. In the house in Washington, after I had sat still for about a week, not writing at all, I wrote a poem one night. And the next morning I got up and wrote another ...”

“... of his senior cabinet member is made on more than casual acquaintance. It is well-known that John F. Kennedy met Dean Rusk for the first time when he interviewed him for the job: Reagan and Haig had seen each other three times before the Election of 1980 but on only one of these occasions, shortly before Reagan’s nomination, had there been anything ...”

“... which, reduced to its essentials, went as follows: a person who was not myself and who was not in Washington DC dreamed that he was asleep and dreaming in Washington DC. In his dream he was threatened and pursued through various states and across the border into Mexico, where his enemies were closing on him. As they were ...”