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“... the control of symptoms. But, as the writer Phyllis Richman recently recalled in a piece for the Washington Post, in the 1960s she heard a cure was expected within a decade (the claim seemed credible because of progress made against tuberculosis, polio and malaria), and similar predictions are made today. She repeats a familiar criticism of medical ...”

“... what the devil to make of this music, and most of us were frank enough to say so’, as the critic John Runciman put it – an attitude that no doubt contributed to the perception that Delius’s music was formless.Delius spent so much of his life abroad that the British context offers only a partial perspective. As a child he taught himself piano, having had ...”

“... of the old, generous, socially concerned Conservatism that Margaret Thatcher destroyed and neither John Major nor William Hague has done anything to re-create. While most other believers in this brand of Toryism, not only from Heath’s generation but the next two, have slipped away, to the House of Lords and points east, this old, old man, 83 next ...”

“... history. The chapter on CIA infiltration of the art world is riddled with howlers (that John Hay Whitney had his ‘own’ museum is one among several mistakes of this sort), but the gist of her argument about Abstract Expressionism and its uses as propaganda is correct, if not wholly original. Who Paid the Piper? is even so a major work of ...”

“... The American philosopher John Dewey thought that democracy should be like a giant conversation: the nation talking to itself about its hopes and fears and listening to what other people have to say. Unfortunately (or perhaps fortunately) for Dewey, he never got to hear what such a conversation might sound like, because the technology wasn’t available ...”

“... understood payback. He dishes out the same kid-glove treatment to Bob Dole, Newt Gingrich, even John Major, whom he was meant to despise because of the help the Tories had offered to Republicans trawling for smears during the 1992 election. ‘“I kind of like old John,” Clinton said, “but a lot of people ...”

“... Gallery in San Marino, in the Frick Collection in New York and in the National Gallery of Art in Washington (the gift of Andrew Mellon and the final resting place of the Widener collection). Antique sculpture, perhaps surprisingly, was never given a major part in this story, though classical architecture certainly was. Duveen’s favourite architect, ...”

“... and bypassing civil service rules on appointments. (Coincidentally, her husband, the Tory MP John Penrose, is Johnson’s official ‘anti-corruption champion’.) The National Institute for Health Protection is a very Johnsonian creation: combining NHS Test and Trace with Public Health England, it was designed by the management consulting firm McKinsey ...”

“... dozen-odd published after her death. Objectivism is also promulgated by the Objectivist Center in Washington DC, until recently run by David Kelley, the author of A Life of One’s Own: Individualism and the Welfare State. Kelley split from the ARI in 1990, ‘dismayed’ by ‘the exploding excesses’ of its ‘official, dogmatic approach’. The Center ...”

“... IRA is not as intimate as the authors claim: Adams – as his series of urgent telephone calls to Washington seemed to show – appeared genuinely not to have known until a few hours before the Docklands bombing that the IRA was about to go back to war after their first ceasefire. And even if Adams is still in the IRA, how significant would this be for the ...”

“... purposefully so, of the stock image of the degraded slave.Douglass was born Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey in Maryland in 1818, to a white man (probably a slaveholder) and an enslaved woman, Harriet Bailey. As he put it in his 1845 memoir, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, his mother, ‘like many other slave women, had many children, but ...”

“... until their superiors shopped them. I met Falcone not long before he died, when he was visiting Washington as a guest of the then director of the FBI, William Sessions. Over dinner, we asked him about his personal security procedures. But Falcone turned aside the implied offer of a professional audit, declaring that the security arrangements provided for ...”

“... beauty, elusive trout and clandestine marijuana plantations. The Cosmos Club, still one of the Washington elite’s favourite watering holes, was founded in 1878 by John Wesley Powell, a devoted Humboldtian, who named it after his hero’s last great work. Over time, Humboldt’s prominence in America declined. In part ...”

“... the way Kraft Television Theater in its day might have dramatised scenes from the life of George Washington. All through the first episode, Draper, as creative director, is racking his brains for the right pitch to sell Lucky Strike cigarettes. Unable to bring even a single good idea into the meeting with his client, Draper asks the company ...”

“... of every other empire. In the new humanitarian empire, power is exercised as a condominium, with Washington in the lead, and London, Paris, Berlin and Tokyo following reluctantly behind. The humanitarian empire is the new face of an old figure: the democratic free world, the Christian West. In the immediate aftermath of 11 September, even after the ...”