“... game was up. Nasser found the Reuters file admirably objective during the Suez crisis. President Kennedy first heard of Krushchev’s proposed deal over the Cuban Missile Crisis via his Reuters printer. The transformation of Reuters’ fortunes – its growth from a news service into a huge international provider of economic information, exploiting the ...”

“... rights. From time to time, both Democrats and Republicans have claimed him as their own. In 1992, William Jefferson Clinton predictably played the Jefferson card, only to be trumped by Ronald Reagan in his speech to the Republican Convention. Parodying the rebuke which Lloyd Bentsen had delivered to Dan Quayle four years previously, Reagan mocked his own ...”

“... politics since 1960, when, at the age of twelve, he sported a large campaign button for John F. Kennedy. Until recently he was a co-editor of Dissent, which prides itself on being the nation’s oldest democratic socialist magazine. His previous books include The Populist Persuasion (1995), an illuminating analysis which predated the recent emergence of ...”

“... is involved. In the 12th century, as Emma Jones writes in her patchy history of London’s water, William Fitzstephen wrote of ‘special wels in the Suburbs’ where the water was ‘sweete, wholesome and cleare’. Water no longer has to be sweet by law, but it does have to be ‘wholesome’, a word that appears in drinking water standards in both the UK ...”

“... to the distant future, writers such as Wells, Edward Bellamy (in Looking Backward: 2000-1887) and William Morris (in News from Nowhere, his rejoinder to Bellamy’s hugely influential novel) sought to vault presently insoluble contradictions. Of course, the same contradictions may well persist into the future, but the shock of the old can enable the awakened ...”

“... we risk the destruction of civilisation. Over the next ten years – under the direction of William Perry, who would eventually become Clinton’s secretary of defense – the US tried to create a new deterrent based on stealth aircraft, smart bombs and other hi-tech gizmos: shock and awe depended on being a generation ahead of anyone else. The results ...”

“... old standard poodle Charley as company. It was election season, as it was this September: Nixon-Kennedy. Steinbeck was 58, younger than the Maestro and myself, and near the end of his life. One can feel it in his writing. He was a smoker and drinker and on his third marriage. He had had a couple of minor strokes. In two years he’d be awarded the Nobel ...”

“... testimonial – which was in fact written by McGeorge Bundy, later national security adviser to Kennedy and Johnson, with input and edits from a number of senior officials intimately involved with the Manhattan Project – was an authoritative counterattack, and it was entirely successful. The message that the bomb had saved a million American lives, in the ...”

“... such marginal representatives of the Civilised Life as Harry S. Truman, Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy (whose presence was, BB felt, ‘life-enhancing’), and, most improbable of all, Ernest Hemingway. Meryle Secrest discloses that Hemingway was desperate in his suit for Berenson’s favours, and would have prostrated himself for a petal from the Great ...”

“... that are undimmed in this final volume. There are other works on the same theme, for example, Paul Kennedy’s The Rise and Fall of British Naval Mastery (1976) and Ben Wilson’s lively Empire of the Deep: The Rise and Fall of the British Navy (2013), but these shorter works concentrate on high power politics rather than the inner workings of the Royal ...”

“... awful potency lasted pretty much through the 1980s, powering the gorgeous prescience and horror of William Gibson’s Neuromancer novels, only to peter out, pretty much, by the mid-1990s, as the dull commercial reality – the real ‘consensual hallucination’, to repurpose Gibson’s phrase – of internet shopping kicked in. There was also, after 1977, the ...”

“... an unlikely Ariadne whose name on the ballot for President of the USA in 1980 was Senator Edward Kennedy. When Kennedy blandly welcomed the Poet at the airport in Naxos or Nassau, all he said was ‘Hello! Goodbye! I must be going!’ – and he then disappeared. The Poet was now on his own, with the dangerous knowledge ...”

“... on her fellow student Peggy James, Mary ‘courted’ her too (‘courted’ is Leavell’s word): William James’s daughter was very much ‘our kind’, and since Mary expected her family to live together always, she could only assume that Peggy would be joining the household – whether as Marianne’s partner or Warner’s was immaterial. But Marianne’s ...”

“... right-wing policies. It is remarkable in these circumstances that anyone wants to succeed William Hague as leader. What should he or she do? The most obvious strategy is just to hang on. The Conservatives are the official opposition and one of the two major parties of the state. The presumption must be that sooner or later Labour will falter and the ...”

“... found the ‘unostentatious luxury, the atmosphere of culture ... soul satisfying’; Jacqueline Kennedy found the old man to be a ‘kind of god-like creature, in the way he doesn’t fit in with the hurly-burly pattern of our present world’. Berenson’s recorded utterances sound all too self-consciously sagacious. ‘Young John Carter Brown, who one day ...”