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“... and rent a video while you did your laundry in machines named after movie stars; mine was called John Belushi. At 8.30 a.m., groups of kids in tie-died grunge were guzzling beer and nachos, and watching Rodney Dangerfield deliver double entendres about policemen’s balls on the big video screen. But Natalie and I had a running battle over my reluctance to ...”

“... and realpolitik is rightly blamed for prolonging the life and liberty of Barbie, but at least in Washington, unlike Whitehall, there are enough people who realise that democracies die by non-disclosure. The story falls into three distinct phases, and it seems reasonable to assume that Isabel Hilton, who covers Latin America for the Sunday Times, dug round ...”

“... love to get it up her and stifle myself between her breasts!’ Here is another Russian, visiting Washington: Surkov thought of the Kennedys. Marilyn Monroe, whom he had met at a party in Los Angeles. A stab of sorrow.     ‘I don’t like this fucking city,’ he growled. ‘It’s all male power. It’s as bad as Moscow.’ He nodded towards an ...”

“... managed to get home to Boston in 1787 after eight years’ absence. Davis’s near contemporary John Nicol was a romantic like Spavens: ‘I had read Robinson Crusoe many times over and longed to be at sea.’ He volunteered for the navy at Leith in 1776, as soon as he had finished his apprenticeship as a cooper, eager for the chance to visit China. Jacob ...”

“... a preferred policy tool has long been recognised, and even celebrated in fiction, for example in John Le Carré’s The Little Drummer Girl (1983), which featured an Israeli spymaster’s devious and successful plot to kill a Palestinian terrorist. One operation in particular caught the popular imagination: the hunting down of the perpetrators of the ...”

“... Designed to keep the hair from obscuring the vision, it was pulled so tight that, as the veteran John Shipp testified, a soldier could scarcely open his eyes. The Tsar’s soldiers had their queues stiffened by iron bars. But the most hated item of equipment was the neckstock, a kind of heavy leather cravat intended to force the soldier’s head erect ...”

“... judge from the writing-seminar circuit who had no connection with Guterson were quite slim. Set in Washington State in 1954 on San Piedro, an ‘island of five thousand damp souls’ in the Puget Sound, the novel opens in a small courthouse where a Japanese-American fisherman is on trial for the murder of a white fisherman. We soon learn that the ...”

“... shows a daredevil riding a high-wheeler, small wheel first, down the steps of the Capitol in Washington. Was there not a Huxley who traversed the Alps on such a mount? (It was not Aldous, that’s for sure.) High-wheelers suffered as much as any kind of bicycle from bad road surfaces, though there were strong men who rode them from Land’s End to ...”

“... that he had believed his client to be totally innocent all along. As my friend and former landlord John O’Sullivan used to be fond of saying (and him a Catholic and all, and editor of the National Review) if the Pope says he believes in God, he’s only doing his job. If he says he doesn’t believe in God, he may be onto something. And Cochran brings me to ...”

“... in Wheatley’s verse residues of African spiritual practices and memories of her birthplace. John Shields has argued that her elegies are compatible with African animist traditions, and proposes that her background was with the Fula people. Odell said Phillis described her mother pouring water ‘before the sun at his rising’, which has led some to ...”

“... claimed, then Barbara Guest was a devout classicist. No American poet – with the exception of John Ashbery – so reverently extended early modernist aesthetics into the second half of the 20th century. As Guest put it in her essay ‘Radical Poetics and Conservative Poetry’, ‘everything we loved, emulated, was attached to the lyric modernism of ...”

“... didn’t answer my other questions didn’t make me doubt for one minute he could read my mind. John Gavin who played Sam in Psycho was Reagan’s ambassador to Mexico. Psycho was the first Hollywood film to show a toilet flush. Encopresis is another mental illness I suffered from. It involves farting. The initials of the history student, now a ...”

“... Congress barely peeped as costs soared – though there were a few notable holdouts, like Senator John McCain, who called it ‘a scandal and a tragedy’. McCain is a leading representative of a dissident American military tradition that prefers light and agile to massive and lumbering, but it may not be insignificant that his home state, Arizona, is one of ...”

“... with George Bissell, who had been a professor of Latin and Greek at Dartmouth, a journalist in Washington and an inspector of schools in New Orleans. On his way back to New Hampshire in 1853, Bissell passed through west Pennsylvania, where he encountered the primitive ‘rock oil’ industry, in which oil seepages were sopped up in rags and sold as patent ...”

“... is clearly about Vietnam, mapped onto Dark Age Britain. The baddies are Roman bureaucrats (think Washington) and Saxons invading from the north (Ho Chi Minh’s army). The good guys are the British ‘Woads’ (South Vietnamese), protected by the Sarmatians, draftees, slave-soldiers, hoping vainly for a return to freedom and their homes – in other ...”