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“... Perhaps some of these people will look out of the window as they journey from Stanford to Washington. Also conspicuous by its absence from these pages is a section on personal morality in the 1980s. If you think this is a matter for private choice, protected by sundry amendments to the US Constitution, cast an eye over a précis of this ...”

“... the pay of the Soviets. In 1986 we learned from Spycatcher, the memoirs of a senior MI5 official Peter Wright, that a secret file on Wilson, labelled the Henry Worthington file was kept in the MI5 director general’s safe. For good measure Wright and his friends were also convinced that a former head of MI5, Sir Roger Hollis, was also a Soviet spy. In July ...”

“... called the ‘Panama track’, after a 2008 diplomatic cable from the US Embassy in Panama City to Washington – courtesy of WikiLeaks – which sets out the advantages clearly: Under this procedure, the suspect is ‘lent’ to the US for prosecution on the condition that they will be returned for prosecution in Panama at the end of their sentence. This ...”

“... real estate was cheap, plentiful and luring the likes of Tom McGuane, Tim Cahill, Jeff Bridges, Peter Fonda and the late Seymor Lawrence. Frontier towns like Livingston and Boulder Creek are today about as close as you can get to a nursing home for Sixties’ veterans and survivors of the more recent Hollywood filmscript wars – complete with a beanery in ...”

“... networks with the same first indications of an American strike against Libya. In New York, I watch Peter Jennings on ABC largely as a matter of habit, although the other anchormen seem to produce roughly the same results. Jennings opened by announcing that something was happening in Tripoli; then he passed things over to two correspondents there who, from ...”

“... chief of naval intelligence, Lieutenant Commander Fleming undertook a secret mission to Washington in May 1941. He was ‘whisked off to a room in the new annexe of the embassy, locked in with a pen and paper and the necessities of life’, a colleague recalled, and there he wrote, ‘under armed guard around the clock, a document of some seventy ...”

“... W and Y. Camp X, at Oak Ridge, Tennessee, was devoted to uranium enrichment; Camp W, at Hanford in Washington State, housed the reactors for producing plutonium; and Camp Y, at Los Alamos in New Mexico, was where the theoretical and experimental physics of the weapon were studied and where the bombs to be used later that year against Japan were being ...”

“... for Meissonier is more relevant. The Menzel exhibition, which took place recently in Paris, Washington and Berlin, encourages one to conclude that his talent, which found a single, fulfilling role in illustration – which is what the crowded parties and street scenes really are – could, in other circumstances, have led him in quite other ...”

“... Independence, to its rise in the Revolution. Both Melville’s grandfathers, Thomas Melvill and Peter Gansevoort, were Revolutionary heroes – Thomas for being among the Sons of Liberty who defied the colonial tax-gatherers in the Boston Tea Party in 1773, Peter for withstanding a British siege in 1777 (after which he ...”

“... his extensive property portfolio, his playboy lifestyle, his motley collection of friends (Peter Mandelson, Nat Rothschild, Prince Andrew), his ready access to Libya’s sovereign wealth fund, and his recently professed willingness to eliminate the enemies of his father’s regime one bullet at a time? He’s a hypocrite, of course, but that hardly ...”

“... work, and strong aversion to speculation beyond what is justified by the experimental results’. Peter Medawar once extolled imaginative guesswork as part of the scientific process. Perutz comments: ‘During the first 33 years of my own research imaginative guesswork proved useless: only after my colleagues and I had solved the structure of haemoglobin by ...”

“... telephoned by President Kennedy and asked to calculate how many Cuban cigars there were in all of Washington. He replied that he didn’t know, but could discover how many cigar stores there were. ‘Well, go to all of them, Pierre, and buy every Havana they’ve got.’ The mystified underling completed his task, and only learned its meaning later that ...”

“... everything that had happened to him in the previous two years’; while the marriage between Sir Peter Teazle and his young bride in The School for Scandal is clearly based on the wooing of Eliza Linley by an elderly suitor before Sheridan came on the scene. And it is, of course, ‘no accident’ that The Rivals starts where most romantic drama would ...”

“... how Richard Scott, Laurance’s cousin and the chairman of the Scott Trust, flew to London from Washington on what my old employers would have called a ‘mercy mission’ to save us from being sold into slavery by his kinsman. This ignorance may have had something to do with the fact that I worked almost entirely at the House of Commons and rarely visited ...”

“... simply relished the humiliation of the Foreign Office. Besides, the political chief involved was Peter Carrington – a remote figure to the mass of newish Tory MPs, whom he had failed to cultivate. High and mighty, he was from the ‘other place’ and politically defenceless in the Commons. I shall always believe that he resigned because he imagined he had ...”