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“... All her life, she seemed curiously fixed in childhood. In December 1957, Marianne met Lt Col John Kelly while working as an interpreter for the US Army, and they were married exactly a year later. On 25 May 1959, Petra’s half-sister was born and named Grace Patricia after the Princess of Monaco. Soon afterwards, ...”

“... well have learned the basics of the art from the recycled works of that universal publisher, Dr John Trusler (d. 1820): ‘Be not dark or mysterious; Affect not absence of mind; Punch no one in conversation; Hold no one by the button; Spit not on the carpet; Dare to be prudish; Avoid mauvaise honte.’ (‘What’s mauvaise honte, Mamma?’ – ‘Oh, ask ...”

“... of the scholarly pretences of his fellow economists and of all manner of other balderdash, John Kenneth Galbraith’s only reticence hides a skilfully disguised but intense puritanism. He may not suffer the classic puritan’s agonies at the thought that somebody, somewhere is having a good time, but if contentment is a goal for the rest of us, it is ...”

“... Most of the Villains section would be devoted to American politicians. Jeane Kirkpatrick and John F. Kennedy are high up in this league, but the top place is rightly reserved for Henry Kissinger. One of the mysteries about international affairs is the state of this man’s reputation. In every continent of the world (except Australia) Kissinger created ...”

“... Laboratory. Most important, Richelson is a senior fellow at the National Security Archive in Washington, the pre-eminent American organisation researching the Cold War and US foreign policy, whose work is based primarily on an aggressive use of the FOIA. The National Security Archive has a well-deserved reputation for bringing suit to compel the ...”

“... befriending and then covering up on behalf of the Democratic politician and presidential hopeful John Edwards takes the genre of enabler’s revenge to a whole new level. ‘Covering up’ doesn’t really do justice to Young’s role, which by the end included going on the run with Edwards’s mistress Rielle Hunter and their love-child (with Young’s own ...”

“... the ambiguities and resorts to conventional wisdom. His list of leaders includes Harry Truman and John Kennedy – two presidents who risked war by exacerbating tensions with the Soviet Union. Dallek views FDR from the perspective of a mid-century liberal who has apparently made his peace with the warfare state. As Dallek sees him, FDR, like his cousin ...”

“... aftermath of World War Two, mainstream Jewish organisations closely monitored signals coming from Washington and adjusted to them. Indeed, it seems that the AJC supported the founding of Israel mainly from fear that a domestic backlash might ensue if the Jewish displaced persons in Europe were not quickly settled. From early on, these organisations harboured ...”

“... power to tough-minded scrutiny of it. In 1999, during Nato’s bombing of Yugoslavia, Moyn went to Washington DC to work as an intern on Clinton’s National Security Council. Today, he is a prominent presence in the intellectual culture of the American left, which, denied representation by a mainstream media busy execrating Trump and boosting Never ...”

“... We were, I later discovered, driving our way through a book I hadn’t read at the time: John Steinbeck’s Travels with Charley, wherein the author and his dog, Charley, lit out on the back roads of America in the fall of 1960, in a new GM pickup, in order to ‘rediscover this monster land’. Steinbeck is precise and prescient about ...”

“... into terrible atrocities. My Lai happened because officers failed.’ Another Marine, Captain John McNamara, wrote home in 1967 that he was appalled by the loose talk he heard among his fellow officers about the need to employ terrorist tactics against terrorists: ‘Just a few years ago it was confined to the fringe. If the actual [US ...”

“... magazine is as good as this one it hurts to throw old copies away. Visiting I.F. Stone once in Washington, I was impressed by his complete bound files of the New York Review of Books, and more impressed still that he had extracted these from the editor as part-payment. Perhaps contributors to the LRB could work the same trick on Karl Miller, who for this ...”

“... political involvement. Early in 1917, he was chosen by the Government of Aristide Briand to go to Washington and represent the case to the President for an American intervention in the European war. Bergson was to ask for credits, as well as for armies, and to reassure the eirenic Wilson that what the French wanted was nothing more vindictive than ‘peace ...”

“... exist as investment banks. On 25 September came the largest bank failure in American history, as Washington Mutual went into receivership following a bank run during which its customers withdrew $16.7 billion in ten days. Taking all these superlatives together, it’s easy to see why the Federal Reserve and the US Treasury (run by Hank Paulson, former head ...”