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“... is pretentious unless you are her first cousin or something, which is the status enjoyed by John Davis. His mother was Jackie’s father’s sister, and the list of his previous book-titles (The Bouviers, The Kennedys, The Guggenheims) shows a well-developed sensitivity to the uses of dynasty. This ‘intimate memoir’ joins a seasonal shelf of at ...”

“... riding a goat cart in Central Park’ before going off to Harvard, where his classmates included John Reed, T.S. Eliot and Conrad Aiken. From birth to death, Fortune – in the form of knowing nearly everyone who counted and being able to defend at least two sides of every major public issue of his time – always favoured him. The list of his friends, his ...”

“... kind of story, this – not just a routine flight from Orlando but a special flight from Washington DC, as it were, with the President on board. The man from the Pru is still right to think that if it hadn’t been this passenger, in this fatal predicament, it would in all likelihood have been someone else, somewhere else. There is still plenty of ...”

“... a US data firm, and a consultant for the biotech company Illumina. He also registered with Washington Speakers Bureau (through which Theresa May has received more than £600,000 in speaking fees since the pandemic began). In August 2018, Cameron was hired by Greensill as a ‘part-time adviser’ and given share options worth as much as $70 ...”

“... the impossibility, for him, of Williams’s kind of free verse, and his stubborn anti-Europeanism. John Crowe Ransom and Allen Tate had special claims on him. As a young man Lowell had fled Harvard to seek instruction from Ransom and Tate in Tennessee and at Kenyon College, Ohio. Tate, the stronger influence, saw himself as a sort of poetic father, assuming an ...”

“... at the Home Office in the week that France fell in May 1940, at which the home secretary, Sir John Anderson, declared that he found it hard to believe that any BUF member would help the Nazis. Presented with evidence that several had already been caught passing secrets, he still insisted that to imprison Mosley or his supporters would make them ...”

“... Village, where he lived for most of his adult life, sketchbook in hand, probably headed for Washington Square Park, having partaken of his morning pear, ‘eaten with a fork in the French style’, with a spot of brandy or a pill to calm his nerves. He read the Wordsworth poem when he delivered his six nonlectures at Harvard in 1952-53 ...”

“... of journalistic montage. It is, indeed, the mourning edition, the memorial edition. In Washington, the controversial World War Two memorial opened to the public for the first time. The controversy has been over the placing of the memorial – smack in the middle of the Mall, historically and aesthetically a symbol of the right of assembly and the ...”

“... a second career in American Intelligence. J. Edgar Hoover amassed tapes of sexual indiscretion in Washington, partly for his own prurient needs and partly for the ends of power. He caused blackmail letters to be sent from the FBI to Dr Martin Luther King, urging him to commit suicide.Historians and journalists have never quite known what to do about these ...”

“... a fact he doesn’t mention in his account of the incident in his memoirs or even in his diary. John McCloy, FDR’s assistant secretary of war, described it as ‘the most gallant thing I’ve ever seen’. Macmillan wasn’t one of those not infrequent war heroes who in peacetime are mild and eager to please. He remained dauntless and daunting in ...”

“... in these programmes, ‘we had arrived big-time on the political scene.’ Adams and the SDLP’s John Hume together worked out the theological basis for what, after many drafts, was to become the British-Irish Downing Street Declaration of December 1993 – the document which paved the way for the IRA ceasefire of August 1994. The programmes give most of the ...”

“... Cavendish himself and by four men who sailed with him, Antony Knivet, a young gentleman volunteer; John Davis, the great navigator; J. Jane, a friend of Davis’s; and Thomas Lodge the poet. Thomas Cavendish was a man of considerable estate but varying fortunes, and like many of his contemporaries he took to the sea to improve them: they were at their charming ...”

“... the country in search of old records that a handful of them – Skip James, Son House, Mississippi John Hurt – were ‘rediscovered’. They became draws on the coffee-house and festival circuit, while recordings by John Lee Hooker, Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf, who had made their names playing house-rocking, amplified ...”

“... which our minds seem incapable of taking in is that, were the explosion to occur over New York or Washington, London or Moscow, one megaton would be equivalent to a million instantaneous deaths,’ he wrote in the New York Review of Books. ‘The President may protest that his SDI dream implies a protection of people and not of silos. But however many times ...”

“... and am astonished when I see on the news in the evening the vast concourse of people gathered in Washington. I don’t read any official estimates of the numbers though it’s to be hoped they estimate more accurately in the US than they do here, where any demonstration of which the police disapprove – the Stop the War marches, for instance – is ...”