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“... to the text may not have been so different from that of an author like Jane Austen who, in John Bayley’s words, ‘set her characters going to see what they might do’, or Pushkin, who in the midst of composing Eugene Onegin wrote to a friend: ‘My Tatiana has gone off and got married. I never would have expected it of her.’ No doubt the drafters ...”

“... politics. To set oneself above the political process itself (and the codename for politics is ‘Washington’) has long been a favourite pose of the ambitious: Carter, Reagan, Clinton, the younger Bush and Obama all ran against Washington and, so far as possible, they kept running against it even as president. By ...”

“... Big Top, and there are sideshows, too. On Day Ten, Glenn Frankel, the correspondent from the Washington Post, who has been regularly turning up on the BBC to put across the Martian view, was entertaining a small audience with the story of his discovery that a mysterious Jake Anderson, billed as the Washington Post ...”

“... calls the private Shrine and the public Temple: Monticello and the Jefferson Memorial in Washington. The ‘pacific’ Jefferson has even won new converts among the ranks of the hawks. In Secret and Sanctioned, Stephen Knott, aware of the difficulty of reconciling necessary covert government operations with an open democracy, invokes the history of ...”

“... market, with the Italian police tracking terrorists. None of these activities compromised his Washington reputation for dependability. He testified before Congressional investigative committees as an expert witness.’ One can positively hear the authorial rubbing of hands. It is the figure of Teddy Regler which lifts the story into the realm of the ...”

“... have a great deal in common. All have close connections with the intelligence services – after John Sawers retired as head of MI6 in 2014, he took up posts at King’s and RUSI – and an equally close relationship with the national security establishment of the United States.Among the British defence intelligentsia, Atlanticism is a foundational ...”

“... up to revere him in Public School, USA. Abraham Lincoln is the father of his people; George Washington, of his nation; but Benjamin Franklin – as it happens, a basically very decent man – hovers over the entire tradition of American ‘Babbittry’. Some subterranean but essential link runs from Poor Richard to Disneyland, Mozart on the muzak and ...”

“... white settlers. Of course, settlers ignored the Proclamation, as did land speculators like George Washington, who instructed his agents to buy as much Indian land in the west as possible while keeping ‘this whole matter a profound secret’ because of its illegality. But Banner’s point is that government officials were committed to dealing with Indians in ...”

“... gnomically (but it’s the truth), ‘Beckmann was time.’ He was successful early, painting John Martin-like catastrophes on a huge scale: visionary, awful, sandy things. The first monograph on him appeared before the First World War, when he was still in his twenties. In the war, he was an ambulance man on the Western Front, before suffering a complete ...”

“... the US promise of individual freedom and global prosperity. Today’s struggle between Moscow and Washington involves traditional nation-state competition for political and economic influence. The scope is no longer global: it is limited to areas bordering Russia – in Europe, the Caucasus and Central Asia – and since 2015 to parts of the Middle East. The ...”

“... Sunday Times book, Philby, the spy who betrayed a generation, which he co-authored in 1968. Mr John Costello has produced Mask of Treachery, dealing with Blunt, while Mr Robert Cecil has written a biography of his former Foreign Office colleague Donald Maclean. To round things out, we have The Storm Birds, Gordon Brook-Shepherd’s study of the Soviet ...”

“... that day at the crimes of England and her associated military reprobates. One who did so was Major John C. Spahr, an executive officer with Marine Fighter Attack Squadron 323, based at Marine Corps Air Station Miramar in San Diego, but serving during the spring of 2005 in the Persian Gulf on the USS Carl Vinson. Major Spahr was 6 feet 3 inches tall and did a ...”

“... you have a fair recipe for a deal on the return the Heights themselves. Given the new fondness in Washington for the Syrian Government, it is hard to think of any concession which, even after a quarter-century of official petrification, will be welcomed more moistly as a sign of ‘flexibility’. Proceeding across the Allenby Bridge to Jordan. I was ...”

“... for his arrest on grounds of filial disobedience. In America, Lafayette attached himself to George Washington, who appreciated the young man’s companionship, bravery and money. Though Lafayette was a general in name, his role in the army initially had little to do with actual fighting. When the signing of a Franco-American alliance in 1778 brought thousands ...”

“... for the US Senate; wrote 17 more novels; lived to memorialise (in essays in this book) his friends John Kennedy, Tennessee Williams, Italo Calvino, Orson Welles, Eleanor Roosevelt, Anaïs Nin ... In this kind of summary Vidal’s life sounds almost comically glamorous and eventful. One of the secrets of his social and professional success lies in the ...”