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“... to say about capitalism or science, evolution or empire. Adams was brought up to regard the Washington political stage as his natural domain – his great-grandfather John Adams was the first president to live in the White House; his grandfather was John Quincy Adams – and he ...”

“... of neoliberal domestic policy and interventionist foreign policy that constitutes consensus in Washington. Neoliberals celebrate market utility as the sole criterion of worth; interventionists exalt military adventure abroad as a means of fighting evil in order to secure global progress. Both agendas have proved calamitous for most Americans. Many ...”

“... how it all comes out.’ Thomas Edison’s first words were ‘It is very beautiful over there.’ John Ford’s first words were ‘May I please have a cigar?’ Ulysses S. Grant’s first word was ‘Water.’ Prince Henry’s first words were ‘I would say something but I cannot utter.’ Washington Irving’s first ...”

“... made by the Johnson administration. In March 1965 he told Michael Stewart, who was about to visit Washington: should the president try to link this question with support for the pound, I would regard this as most unfortunate and no doubt you will reply appropriately. If the financial weakness we inherited and are in the process of putting right is to be used ...”

“... control over a population; or it meant democratic or procedural legitimacy. Which standard Washington used – control or legitimacy – depended on which was best able to protect foreign private property. In all cases, the United States reserved the right, often invoking its own sense of exceptionalism, to be the judge. 9. US envoys occasionally sided ...”

“... integrity imperilled by Russian tyranny, but the future of democracy was under threat. In the Washington Post of 11 August, Robert Kagan asserted that the conflict will be seen as ‘a turning point no less significant’ than the fall of the Berlin Wall. Given this ‘much bigger drama’, ‘the details of who did what to precipitate Russia’s war ...”

“... democracy in Chile meant socialism. Allende’s domestic programme alone was enough to trouble Washington, but it was his foreign policy that most alarmed Kissinger, then Nixon’s national security adviser. Poor, remote, sparsely populated and oddly shaped, Chile, Kissinger once quipped, was a dagger pointed at the heart of Antarctica. With Allende’s ...”

“... of a rickety economy and the disastrous invasion of Iraq. They had waged a successful campaign in Washington to restrict access to late-term abortion. They had launched a series of ballot initiatives intended to prevent states or judges legalising gay marriage. And they had encouraged the Bush administration to appoint sympathetic justices to the Supreme ...”

“... three in London but three in New York as well. Today each of these cities can boast just one, with Washington, since the death of the Washington Star in 1981, possessing none at all. It is, therefore, a bold and defiant moment to produce an elaborate house history of one of the few survivors of a declining newspaper art-form ...”

“... and hospitalisation there, his marriage in 1921 to Josephine Dolan (a nurse whom he met in Tacoma, Washington), his settling in San Francisco, and the beginnings of his efforts to write fiction. This brings Layman to the period 1923 to 1933, the remarkable decade during which Hammett produced the host of short stories (mainly in Black Mask) and the five novels ...”

“... The majority of books about John F. Kennedy have been written either by toadying family retainers or by people bent on destroying the Camelot myth. The historian Robert Dallek is neither; he decided to enter the field, as he explains in his introduction, in part because documents had become available that threw new light on several aspects of Kennedy’s life, and in part because he thought the old ones should be given a fresh reading ...”

“... McCullough’s Truman (1992) was on the bestseller lists for the better part of a year, and his John Adams (2001) is providing an astonishing repeat performance. Robert Caro’s dramatically detailed look at The Years of Lyndon Johnson has been unfolding since 1982, and large chunks of Volume Three have been serialised in the New Yorker. In the ...”

“... famous Apache chief Geronimo – before he was posted to the Adjutant-General’s staff. Being in Washington gave him the chance to lobby for, and to secure, America’s highest decoration for bravery, the Congressional Medal of Honour, for leading a Union charge up Missionary Ridge near Chattanooga 26 years earlier. Doggedly collecting what he considered due ...”

“... widely, but wrongly, interpreted as a prelude to their reinstatement. Musharraf and his backers in Washington panicked and the US ambassador summoned Zardari. The message from Washington was clear. The State Department was determined to keep Musharraf in power as long as Bush was in the White House. If the chief justice and ...”

“... a solemn and respectful visit to Gore Vidal’s grave. It is to be found in Rock Creek Cemetery in Washington. You take a few paces down the slope from the graveyard’s centrepiece, which is the lachrymose and androgynous Mourning Figure sculpted by August St Guldens for Henry Adams’s unhappy wife Clover (whose name always puts me in mind of an overworked ...”