“... everything that had happened to him in the previous two years’; while the marriage between Sir Peter Teazle and his young bride in The School for Scandal is clearly based on the wooing of Eliza Linley by an elderly suitor before Sheridan came on the scene. And it is, of course, ‘no accident’ that The Rivals starts where most romantic drama would ...”

“... how Richard Scott, Laurance’s cousin and the chairman of the Scott Trust, flew to London from Washington on what my old employers would have called a ‘mercy mission’ to save us from being sold into slavery by his kinsman. This ignorance may have had something to do with the fact that I worked almost entirely at the House of Commons and rarely visited ...”

“... simply relished the humiliation of the Foreign Office. Besides, the political chief involved was Peter Carrington – a remote figure to the mass of newish Tory MPs, whom he had failed to cultivate. High and mighty, he was from the ‘other place’ and politically defenceless in the Commons. I shall always believe that he resigned because he imagined he had ...”

“... The first was as a point man between the British military establishment and the new government in Washington, a town presided over by another John/Jack the lad. Profumo’s go-getting reputation and unstuffy demeanour made him attractive to the men around JFK, who liked that he didn’t seem like a typical Brit, never mind a typical Tory. He was extremely ...”

“... fallen state of the American publishing industry. (Madison’s book traces a completed cycle from Washington Irving, who helped his publisher with money in an emergency, to Clifford Irving, who embezzled his publisher out of a million dollars. The cases are symptomatic.) In Madison’s analysis, agency destroys the sodality which flourished in the golden age ...”

“... of burning resentment in Latin America than would British military failure. Sensible people in Washington simply dread the scenario of Argentinian humiliation, at the hands of a British colonialist aggression – for that is how it is portrayed among the peoples stretching from Mexico City to Cape Horn, where Britain is virtually friendless. This ...”

“... Perhaps it was after visiting, long after almost everyone else I know, the Vietnam Memorial in Washington, with its conscious allusion to the famous Lutyens memorial at Thiepval (and by extension to its more modest incarnation in a Norfolk market town). Or was it an earlier visit to the Apache graveyard at Fort Sill, Oklahoma, shockingly memorable not for ...”

“... violence. That this is equally true in political life became clear in the recent attempt by Washington to tie Benazir Bhutto to Pervez Musharraf. The single, strong parent in this case was a desperate State Department – with John Negroponte as the ghoulish go-between and Gordon Brown as the blushing bridesmaid – fearful that if it did not push this ...”

“... he would win easily. This interview was conducted in French, in Pretoria, on 20 July 2006. Peter Hallward: Haiti is a profoundly divided country, and you have always been a profoundly divisive figure. For most of the 1990s many sympathetic observers found it easy to make sense of this division more or less along class lines: you were demonised by the ...”

“... 4 January. A Christmas letter from Cami Elbow, wife of Peter Elbow, an American college friend who teaches English at Amherst: Life in Amherst is very placid. Even grammatically correct. In December the town decided to encourage shoppers to patronise the downtown stores with free parking. They ordered plastic bags to cover up the parking meters but the bags arrived with the message wrongly punctuated: ‘Season’s Greeting’s ...”

“... seemed so grim that at one point President Ford was even induced to turn the sound down on a Washington-Minnesota football match he was watching on TV. It was fortunate for Britain that individuals in the State Department and the President’s entourage should have so exaggerated the likely consequences if Britain were ‘pushed too far’. (Brent ...”

“... that rural nostalgia has been the fuel of British economic decline. One of the many merits of Peter Mandler’s superb study is that it utterly demolishes these assumptions. He shows that, by Continental standards, Britain has been exceptionally slow to protect its country houses. Political intervention has been resisted and commercial development put ...”

“... rather than the sombre integrity of classical scholarship. Sophomores traipse round the Washington National Gallery, its rooms stocked with Berenson’s acquisitions, carrying Ferguson’s Guide to Christian Signs and Symbols rather than the once ubiquitous Italian Painters of the Renaissance. Similarly, Berenson’s canvas-tapping, idiom-hunting ...”

“... in New York. Pope was subsequently chosen as the architect of the National Gallery of Art in Washington and was also responsible for the design of the Duveen Gallery for the Elgin Marbles in the British Museum (not, as Spalding claims, destroyed in the Second World War but damaged and re-opened in 1962). The hushed temple in the heart of the Tate was for ...”

“... It encouraged an extremist Islamism, and an equally extreme warlordism in lieu of government. Washington made its own generous contribution. Rather than endorse Gorbachev’s efforts to forge a coalition government and deny all sides an illusory ‘victory’, Reagan and then Bush, with Pakistani connivance, ratcheted up support for the most murderous of ...”