“... chemical and biological warfare (CBW), which had tripled its budget between 1961 and 1964 as the Kennedy and Johnson administrations began the systematic use of defoliants and herbicides in Vietnam. Hersh found a colonel who had recently retired from the US Army Chemical Corps with grave doubts about the morality of the work he had been doing. The colonel ...”

“... Was the Week That Was broadcast a sickeningly sycophantic tribute to the assassinated President Kennedy. There was no part of public life, he insisted, which was free of humbug and therefore immune to mockery. Peter’s own statements to journalists must always be treated with caution. He could rarely resist satirising himself or his interviewer, and ...”

“... hanky-panky across the country on both sides on election night. But at least when Chicago Mayor Richard Daley helped to deliver Illinois to John Kennedy in the narrow contest of 1960, it was not televised. (For those keeping track of our dynastic democracy, Richard was father to ...”

“... larger Cold War game. In response to Barzani’s plea, he instructed the US ambassador in Tehran, Richard Helms, to convey his sympathies: We appreciate the deep concern which prompted … Barzani’s message to Secretary Kissinger. We can understand that the difficult decisions which the Kurdish people now face are a cause of deep anguish for them. We have ...”

“... street was demolished in 1971, but you can see it clearly in the film 10 Rillington Place starring Richard Attenborough and John Hurt, filmed on location shortly before demolition. The houses had bay windows going all the way down to the ground, and no front steps or front gardens. Number 10 was the last house on the left, jammed up against the wall of a ...”

“... the Cold War and, in a dig at Bush, for his ability to govern without partisan rancour. In 1985 Richard Reeves published The Reagan Detour, a book aimed at fellow Democrats who were disheartened by Reagan’s stunning victory in the 1984 election. He assured his readers that Reaganism would be short-lived: Americans still supported Social Security, they ...”

“... called on Halleck on arrival in New York in 1842, but later wrote him off as a mere imitator. Richard Dana thought his ‘Marco Bozzaris’ was America’s best lyric poem. John Quincy Adams referred to one of his poems in a speech to the House of Representatives in 1836. Most inexplicable of all, on 15 May 1877, fifty thousand people gathered in Central ...”

“... One woman devoted to the President, however, Doris Kearns Goodwin (following Presidential scholars Richard Neustadt and Eric Larrabee), defends the political virtues of Roosevelt’s ‘management style’. By multiplying advisers he broke free of White House insularity, the argument goes, and was put in touch with diverse – conflicting – points of ...”

“... combined, and John Wayne was in one of them. Orange County is in Southern California, home of Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, of Hollywood, Disneyland and John Wayne. Nixon would have lost his home state and the White House in 1968 without his Southern California support. At the 1984 Republican Convention, Reagan, our second Southern California ...”

“... but would never think of saying a word, asking a word, about anyone else’s work … Caroline Kennedy (Schlossberg) was there. The Pete Gurneys, daughter a graduate of the Yale English school, now a financial officer at the ad agency whose long name still ends in Benton and Bowles. That little rat, Jerzy R. Kosinski, thought Conrad was a good subject to ...”

“... On 22 February 1965, the fifth month of Harold Wilson’s first ministry, Richard Crossman recorded the following in his Diaries of a Cabinet Minister: Then Harold Wilson raised the issue of Anthony Howard. He has just been appointed by the Sunday Times to be the first Whitehall correspondent in history, looking into the secrets of the Civil Service rather than leaking the secrets of the politicians ...”

“... Who can forget the moment in Chapter Six of Greenmantle when Richard Hannay penetrates the inner apartments of Colonel Ulric von Stumm and, with a thrill of horror, realises that there is something distinctly rum about the chief of Prussian Intelligence: Everywhere on little tables and in cabinets was a profusion of knick-knacks, and there was some beautiful embroidery framed on screens ...”

“... The story of the making of the atomic bomb has been told countless times before, most notably by Richard Rhodes, but Baggott’s book is rare in giving details not just of the successful Anglo-Canadian-American effort at Los Alamos, but the competing efforts in Germany, Japan and the USSR, culminating with the explosion of Joe-1 (the first Soviet bomb) in ...”

“... Manchester, better known for his account of the assassination of his wartime friend, John F. Kennedy, Death of a President. Written in a racy, sometimes sensational style, the book was full of sweeping generalisations about Germany and the Germans, whom Manchester, not least because of his war experiences, clearly did not like. The Krupps were demonised ...”

“... that Lee Harvey Oswald saw The Manchurian Candidate, which was released in 1962, a year before Kennedy’s assassination. A more plausible cinematic influence on him is Suddenly (1954), in which Frank Sinatra plays a President’s assassin who acquired his taste for killing in the Second World War. Yet the idea was there in The Manchurian Candidate: an ...”