“... family being the place where unfamiliarity begins): I remember one summer I worked a lot in Washington Square Park. It must have been about 1966. The park was divided. It has these walks, sort of like a sunburst, and there were these territories staked out. There were young hippie-junkies down one row. There were lesbians down another, really ...”

“... resistance. In contrast, nations in the Near East or Central Asia were not worth fighting for. In Washington’s eyes, they were sideshows, to be, if not ignored outright, then allocated to diplomats or purveyors of dirty tricks rather than to soldiers. That somewhere like Afghanistan might be worth the life of even a single American would have struck ...”

“... wars’, like the Revolution and World War Two, which seem to fit this model, are memorialised in Washington, Hollywood films and national bestsellers. Anderson and Cayton, by contrast, devote extended attention to wars for which no public monuments exist and of which most Americans remain ignorant. These include the war against Britain of 1812, motivated in ...”

“... their way into the centre of the town. Recep Tayyip Erdoğan predicted that its fall was imminent; John Kerry spoke of the ‘tragedy’ of Kobani, but claimed – implausibly – that its capture wouldn’t be of great significance. A well-known Kurdish fighter, Arin Mirkan, blew herself up as the Isis fighters advanced: it looked like a sign of despair and ...”

“... were several, including partisans operating behind enemy lines. It is thought that one of them was John Cairncross, one of the ‘Cambridge Five’, who had also been supplying Ultra information to the Russians from his post at Bletchley. That James’s information was both copious and refined by British Military Intelligence into an easily assimilable form ...”

“... way this solid, deserving Midwestern duckling metamorphosed into a controversial and formidable Washington swan is well known. Wellesley’s cultural and geographical distance from Illinois, plus the shock waves of Vietnam and the Civil Rights movement, swiftly changed her from a pro-Goldwater Republican into a New York Times-reading proto-Democrat. The new ...”

“... when, after four of his cronies turned down Pendergast’s offer to be his senator cum lackey in Washington, Pendergast approached Truman, who obliged. When Truman arrived in Washington as a senator, newspapers jeered at him as the ‘senator from Pendergast’. Truman tried to distance himself from the boss. He made his ...”

“... Rubio, another member of the orthodox neoconservative faction who once co-wrote an article with John McCain in the Wall Street Journal claiming that the overthrow of Gaddafi would lead to ‘a democratic and pro-American Libya’. Rubio is preoccupied with schemes to destabilise Cuba, Venezuela and Iran. As late as 2022 he was criticising Trump’s ...”

“... racists. All of them could see the self-evident connection between the rise of the war party in Washington and the defeat of civil rights and the ‘Great Society’. Many of them came from families where military service was a proud axiom. All of them felt guilty and indebted for their luck. At 46 Leckford Road, in a scruffy house where many of them hung ...”

“... should ‘decide when would be the proper time to drop one’. According to Ann and John Tusa, Winston Churchill, then out of office, ‘went on a solitary rampage, growling that the Russians must be told to retreat from Berlin or “we will raze their cities.” ’ Perhaps he had only old-fashioned razing in mind. (Lord Boothby has put it on ...”

“... or not the story is true, it conveys Franklin’s stature as the only serious rival to George Washington for the title of America’s greatest hero of the age. He was the American Newton, Voltaire and Talleyrand rolled into one: the most distinguished scientist, the most accomplished prose stylist and sharpest wit, the most skilful diplomat. Franklin was ...”

“... earlier this year, and first given as the A.W. Mellon lectures at the National Gallery in Washington, addresses some of the limited and misleading way in which these works have been defined over the centuries, within China and in the West.* Gombrich, for instance, characterised ‘Chinese painting’ on the basis of a single example from the Boston ...”

“... was seamed with cracks into which ‘wedges’ could be driven. The Cold War historian John Lewis Gaddis wrote 20 years ago that American statesmen in the postwar period never ‘believed in the existence of an international Communist monolith’. After reading Selverstone’s work, it would be hard to accept that judgment. But at almost all times ...”

“... United Nations to investigate atrocities committed during Israel’s 2008-9 assault on Gaza. Or John Prendergast, a former Human Rights Watch researcher and co-founder of Enough, an anti-genocide group affiliated with the Centre for American Progress, who has called for military intervention to oust Robert Mugabe. It’s not just Americans: Michael ...”

“... Iraq after Halliburton’s engineering and construction subsidiary KBR; or the Carlyle Group, the Washington-based global investment firm, of which Baker is senior counsellor. Carlyle is where former top government officials come to roost alongside powerful business leaders, to raise funds and identify takeover targets; a giant hedge fund, if you will, with ...”