“... into its own: its complacencies, tyrannies and inhibitions now seem positively seductive. Peter Gay proposes to write a series of six volumes on ‘The Bourgeois Experience’, of which this is the second, and it is clear that he is on the way to sales and success. Shrewdly, the first two volumes deal respectively with sex and love as parts of the ...”

“... to safety in 1985 – a Soviet traitor who was the mirror-image of Philby, MI6’s point-man in Washington three and a half decades earlier. However, ‘Farewell’, though he seems to have been contacted by the West in the early Seventies, was only ‘on stream’ for a short while before being unmasked and executed, probably in early 1983. Penkovsky’s ...”

“... Perhaps some of these people will look out of the window as they journey from Stanford to Washington. Also conspicuous by its absence from these pages is a section on personal morality in the 1980s. If you think this is a matter for private choice, protected by sundry amendments to the US Constitution, cast an eye over a précis of this ...”

“... the pay of the Soviets. In 1986 we learned from Spycatcher, the memoirs of a senior MI5 official Peter Wright, that a secret file on Wilson, labelled the Henry Worthington file was kept in the MI5 director general’s safe. For good measure Wright and his friends were also convinced that a former head of MI5, Sir Roger Hollis, was also a Soviet spy. In July ...”

“... called the ‘Panama track’, after a 2008 diplomatic cable from the US Embassy in Panama City to Washington – courtesy of WikiLeaks – which sets out the advantages clearly: Under this procedure, the suspect is ‘lent’ to the US for prosecution on the condition that they will be returned for prosecution in Panama at the end of their sentence. This ...”

“... right-wing European politicians. Most of those present supported a Hungarian cardinal called Peter Erdo. ‘He’s what we need right now,’ Tim Busch, president of the conservative Napa Institute in California, told the Times. ‘We need someone who can teach clearly and be strong.’ When it came to the cardinals’ vote, Erdo’s case could not have ...”

“... flower of the late Gilded Age, when the Guggenheims joined Bunker Hill to turn the city of Tacoma, Washington into a centre for lead and copper smelting, processes that give off cadmium, arsenic, lead oxide and sulphuric acid in colossal quantities. The resulting stink came to be known as ‘the aroma of Tacoma’. During the Second World War (a ‘war of ...”

“... real estate was cheap, plentiful and luring the likes of Tom McGuane, Tim Cahill, Jeff Bridges, Peter Fonda and the late Seymor Lawrence. Frontier towns like Livingston and Boulder Creek are today about as close as you can get to a nursing home for Sixties’ veterans and survivors of the more recent Hollywood filmscript wars – complete with a beanery in ...”

“... networks with the same first indications of an American strike against Libya. In New York, I watch Peter Jennings on ABC largely as a matter of habit, although the other anchormen seem to produce roughly the same results. Jennings opened by announcing that something was happening in Tripoli; then he passed things over to two correspondents there who, from ...”

“... chief of naval intelligence, Lieutenant Commander Fleming undertook a secret mission to Washington in May 1941. He was ‘whisked off to a room in the new annexe of the embassy, locked in with a pen and paper and the necessities of life’, a colleague recalled, and there he wrote, ‘under armed guard around the clock, a document of some seventy ...”

“... for Meissonier is more relevant. The Menzel exhibition, which took place recently in Paris, Washington and Berlin, encourages one to conclude that his talent, which found a single, fulfilling role in illustration – which is what the crowded parties and street scenes really are – could, in other circumstances, have led him in quite other ...”

“... W and Y. Camp X, at Oak Ridge, Tennessee, was devoted to uranium enrichment; Camp W, at Hanford in Washington State, housed the reactors for producing plutonium; and Camp Y, at Los Alamos in New Mexico, was where the theoretical and experimental physics of the weapon were studied and where the bombs to be used later that year against Japan were being ...”

“... Independence, to its rise in the Revolution. Both Melville’s grandfathers, Thomas Melvill and Peter Gansevoort, were Revolutionary heroes – Thomas for being among the Sons of Liberty who defied the colonial tax-gatherers in the Boston Tea Party in 1773, Peter for withstanding a British siege in 1777 (after which he ...”

“... his extensive property portfolio, his playboy lifestyle, his motley collection of friends (Peter Mandelson, Nat Rothschild, Prince Andrew), his ready access to Libya’s sovereign wealth fund, and his recently professed willingness to eliminate the enemies of his father’s regime one bullet at a time? He’s a hypocrite, of course, but that hardly ...”

“... work, and strong aversion to speculation beyond what is justified by the experimental results’. Peter Medawar once extolled imaginative guesswork as part of the scientific process. Perutz comments: ‘During the first 33 years of my own research imaginative guesswork proved useless: only after my colleagues and I had solved the structure of haemoglobin by ...”