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“... Perhaps the biggest knock to the Western position comes from the head of the UN forces, Douglas MacArthur, hardly a man to suspect of going soft on a Communist conspiracy. At a time when Western governments were loudly proclaiming Soviet responsibility for the Korean War, MacArthur was saying in private that this was not the case. In a report dated ...”

“... to the party of territorial expansion and property rights under Andrew Jackson and Stephen Douglas; while the Whig party, once associated with John Adams, under the new name of Republicans extended the cause of liberty beyond the right of property. ‘I remember,’ Lincoln wrote in 1859, once being amused at seeing ...”

“... among the orange groves and onion fields north of Los Angeles. We do catch the odd glimpse of Douglas Fairbanks or Charlie Chaplin off-duty, and we learn that, ‘contrary to dark rumour’, Fairbanks wears his own teeth: but what Vidal has to offer might have been more accurately if less enticingly labelled Woodrow Wilson and Warren Harding. Hollywood ...”

“... for its ‘gross boastfulness’: ‘It is written, if I may say so, in the style of “How Bill Adams Won the Battle of Waterloo”. The writer has been so anxious to show how important he was, how invariably he was right, and how much more he could tell if only his mouth was not what he was pleased to call closed.’ Peter Wright’s Spycatcher (1987) got ...”

“... Webster, as well as eloquent spokesmen on both sides of the slavery question, such as Stephen Douglas and William Seward. John Quincy Adams didn’t consider it beneath him to serve in the House after his term as president. Such men offer a sharp contrast to the smaller-than-life mediocrities who occupy seats today. But ...”

“... the élite Rice University, which has a beautiful campus laid out by the Boston architect Ralph Adams Cram just before the Great War; Cram’s original Byzantine-eclectic halls and quadrangles are still being gracefully augmented by sympathetic architects such as Cesar Pelli. Fox is the author of the covetable AIA guide to Houston, published in 1990 and so ...”

“... territory, but with another curious turn. For this strange emotion – what Douglas Adams might have called ‘the long toothache of the soul’ – isn’t a late 20th-century Hollywood add-on, but Tolkien himself, through and through. He theorised it in his 1938 lecture ‘On Fairy-Stories’ as ‘a fleeting glimpse of Joy beyond ...”

“... case of Haiti – and to take another crack at the Clinton who has offended him by meeting Gerry Adams, and so can do nothing right – he has his deadly thrust at the ready: ‘The year 1994 is a lot more like Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four than the chronological 1984 was. Operation Restore Democracy is a masterpiece both of Newspeak and ...”

“... it should have some ‘chastening influence … on the self-confidence of mankind’, and Henry Adams likened the news to the foundering of the Republican Party: ‘the sum and triumph of civilisation … our greatest achievement sinks at a touch … Nature jeers at us for our folly.’ The sinking of the Titanic very quickly seemed freighted with ...”

“... I discarded them like squeezed-out grapefruit skins. In the course of 24 hours, I might be Nick Adams, Paul Morel, and sitting in one of the dives on 52nd Street, uncertain and afraid, as the clever hopes expired of a low dishonest decade; but these were less acts of serious reading than experiments in identity, made by somebody who very much feared that he ...”

“... could afford to ignore. It is said that on the night before he decided to grant a visa to Gerry Adams, Bill Clinton watched a film about the catastrophic injustice inflicted on one Irish family by the British state. Here, Lord Scarman and Lord Devlin, retired law lords, joined Cardinal Hume, the head of the Catholic Church in England, in educating ...”

“... Government had all along been engaged in dialogue not with the mere ‘pseudo-terrorist’ Gerry Adams but with the IRA itself, via intermediaries specifically authorised to act on its behalf. If this did not breach Questions of Procedure for Ministers, then it is hard to know how its guidance can ever be disregarded. When Ian Paisley drew this to the ...”