“... 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 ...”

“... With the arguable exception of John J. Pershing, whose over-inflated reputation derives entirely from his brief tenure commanding US forces on the Western Front, General Leonard Wood was America’s most prominent military officer during the first quarter of the 20th century. More than any of his contemporaries, military or civilian, Wood embodied the first American empire, inaugurated by the outward thrust of 1898, reaching its zenith in 1917 with US intervention in the Great War, and then petering out in the disappointing aftermath of that struggle ...”

“... government, which had sold the reactor to Iraq, protested. Bertrand Barre, its nuclear attaché in Washington, explained that the reactor posed no proliferation risk and that ‘it was intended to be used … for testing or converting materials into isotopes, which have specialised uses in medicine.’ The UN Security Council strongly condemned the attack as ...”

“... of warfare hope will animate the rank and file, they themselves do not necessarily share them. As John Keegan pungently demonstrates, warfare since tribal times has always been divided more or less unevenly between those who direct it, those who enjoy it (in different contexts and for different reasons) and those who suffer it. This last class would ...”

“... National Security Adviser), but also supplied the President with what National Security Adviser John Poindexter called ‘plausible deniability’ by insulating him from the men like North who were actually implementing his covert operations. Split from one another and from Reagan himself, North and Regan were the doubles of the President they served. ‘I ...”

“... clerks, trying to build the party in the South, would register anyone. They became Republicans. John Rice and his father were Presbyterian preachers, and Condoleezza retells, almost word for word, the story from her 2000 Republican National Convention speech about how her grandfather became a Presbyterian as a college student: Granddaddy Rice … had no ...”

“... have been inferences based on intuitions, in particular the intuition that certain sentences (‘John speaks fluently English’), though understandable, are nonetheless ‘in some way bad’, as Neil Smith and Nicholas Allott put it in their study of Chomsky, and that the ability to sense this badness is innate. Another piece of evidence for innateness, on ...”

“... presentation. In commenting at some length on the journal of Alfred Dodd, a student in 1836 at Washington College, Hartford, Connecticut, he remarks on the fact that Dodd, ‘discovering his capacious gift for erotic investment in the first days of Queen Victoria’s reign, loved men and women indiscriminately without undue self-laceration, without visible ...”

“... or swim with Ngo Dinh Diem’ was a recipe for failure. In July 1964, however, he was asked by John McNaughton, the Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs, to join him in the Pentagon as his special assistant. The Secretary of Defense, Robert McNamara, had given McNaughton responsibility for co-ordinating strategy towards ...”

“... native Havana, I thought that every capital city had a Capitolio that looked like the Capitol in Washington. Cubans were proud of their Capitolio: an aerial view of Havana with the building at the centre appeared on the cover of the civics book my mother wrote. Eventually I found out that our Capitolio was a copy of the one in ...”

“... are forced to make choices without having the knowledge that would enable us to make them; or, as John Gray has put it: ‘We are forced to live as if we were free.’ Joseph Stiglitz recently wrote that, although there is a growing consensus among economists that any bailout based on Henry Paulson’s plan won’t work, ‘it is impossible for politicians to ...”

“... been the most powerful vice-president in American history. In four long articles published in the Washington Post at the end of June, Barton Gellman and Jo Becker revealed much that was previously unknown, if not entirely unsuspected, about the way Cheney operates. Gellman and Becker’s series was more concerned with Cheney’s methods than with his motives ...”

“... When an ailing John Maynard Keynes travelled to the American South in March 1946, he was delighted by what he found. The ‘balmy air and bright azalean colour’ of Savannah offered a welcome reprieve from the cold and damp of London, he wrote on arriving, and the children in the streets were livelier company than the ‘irritable’ and ‘exceedingly tired’ citizens of postwar Britain ...”

“... in the Western world, because, among all the presidents and premiers who exercise power from Washington to the borders of the old Russian Empire, he seems to be the only figure guided by a sense of history. The Euro-ideals of Kohl, Mitterrand, Major and the rest are based on the presumption that it is more polite to behave as if the past had never ...”

“... a name which he later changed for the same reasons that Marion Morrison became ‘Duke’ John Wayne and Izzy Demsky became Kirk Douglas. There was another motive. Grey’s birthplace was Zanesville in Ohio – a town founded by and named after his grandfather. Some of his early works, before he found a richer vein further west, piously celebrate the ...”