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“... their way into the centre of the town. Recep Tayyip Erdoğan predicted that its fall was imminent; John Kerry spoke of the ‘tragedy’ of Kobani, but claimed – implausibly – that its capture wouldn’t be of great significance. A well-known Kurdish fighter, Arin Mirkan, blew herself up as the Isis fighters advanced: it looked like a sign of despair and ...”

“... were several, including partisans operating behind enemy lines. It is thought that one of them was John Cairncross, one of the ‘Cambridge Five’, who had also been supplying Ultra information to the Russians from his post at Bletchley. That James’s information was both copious and refined by British Military Intelligence into an easily assimilable form ...”

“... way this solid, deserving Midwestern duckling metamorphosed into a controversial and formidable Washington swan is well known. Wellesley’s cultural and geographical distance from Illinois, plus the shock waves of Vietnam and the Civil Rights movement, swiftly changed her from a pro-Goldwater Republican into a New York Times-reading proto-Democrat. The new ...”

“... when, after four of his cronies turned down Pendergast’s offer to be his senator cum lackey in Washington, Pendergast approached Truman, who obliged. When Truman arrived in Washington as a senator, newspapers jeered at him as the ‘senator from Pendergast’. Truman tried to distance himself from the boss. He made his ...”

“... racists. All of them could see the self-evident connection between the rise of the war party in Washington and the defeat of civil rights and the ‘Great Society’. Many of them came from families where military service was a proud axiom. All of them felt guilty and indebted for their luck. At 46 Leckford Road, in a scruffy house where many of them hung ...”

“... should ‘decide when would be the proper time to drop one’. According to Ann and John Tusa, Winston Churchill, then out of office, ‘went on a solitary rampage, growling that the Russians must be told to retreat from Berlin or “we will raze their cities.” ’ Perhaps he had only old-fashioned razing in mind. (Lord Boothby has put it on ...”

“... or not the story is true, it conveys Franklin’s stature as the only serious rival to George Washington for the title of America’s greatest hero of the age. He was the American Newton, Voltaire and Talleyrand rolled into one: the most distinguished scientist, the most accomplished prose stylist and sharpest wit, the most skilful diplomat. Franklin was ...”

“... earlier this year, and first given as the A.W. Mellon lectures at the National Gallery in Washington, addresses some of the limited and misleading way in which these works have been defined over the centuries, within China and in the West.* Gombrich, for instance, characterised ‘Chinese painting’ on the basis of a single example from the Boston ...”

“... was seamed with cracks into which ‘wedges’ could be driven. The Cold War historian John Lewis Gaddis wrote 20 years ago that American statesmen in the postwar period never ‘believed in the existence of an international Communist monolith’. After reading Selverstone’s work, it would be hard to accept that judgment. But at almost all times ...”

“... Iraq after Halliburton’s engineering and construction subsidiary KBR; or the Carlyle Group, the Washington-based global investment firm, of which Baker is senior counsellor. Carlyle is where former top government officials come to roost alongside powerful business leaders, to raise funds and identify takeover targets; a giant hedge fund, if you will, with ...”

“... United Nations to investigate atrocities committed during Israel’s 2008-9 assault on Gaza. Or John Prendergast, a former Human Rights Watch researcher and co-founder of Enough, an anti-genocide group affiliated with the Centre for American Progress, who has called for military intervention to oust Robert Mugabe. It’s not just Americans: Michael ...”

“... all. In 1938, a disappointingly low-level Russian calling himself ‘Michael Green’ appeared in Washington and acquired from Straight a few mildly private memoranda on general themes prepared for the State Department. Straight also handed over some essays in which he suggested to Stalin that his foreign policy was destructive and mistaken: ‘Green’, if ...”

“... in the White House make up the intelligence as they go along?”’ The complaints focus on what Washington did not have: any advance warning from the assumed source of the attack. The military intelligence community has for years produced a highly classified early morning intelligence summary, known as the Morning Report, for the secretary of defence and ...”

“... of the American financial system emerging economies need no longer submit to the dictates of a ‘Washington consensus’ that was never implemented in Washington. It might be thought that the current phase of globalisation would allow a greater degree of international co-operation. In some ways, however, this new phase is ...”

“... She married a young Air Force officer, and became, in her twenties, an important personality in Washington society. Her main male friend outside her collapsing marriage was the Ambassador in Washington of the new Fascist regime in Italy, Prince Gelasio Caetani, an attractive and powerful propagandist for Mussolini. While ...”