I was in New York all summer, making a big fuss about DC to all those sophisticated cosmopolitans. They think it’s boring. They assume it’s full of squares and policy nerds and they’re right, but that characterization doesn’t do the capital justice. It’s my job as a Washington ambassador to accurately portray the city to the snobbish coastal elites, even to sex it up a bit (though it really doesn’t need my help in this respect). Regardless, it’s a job I take seriously.

Good riddance, Monty Don

Britain’s sanctions against Israel will backfire

Christopher Kennedy-Barnard

The curious case of balaclavas on Britain’s streets

The obvious hook is, of course, espionage. Espionage is chock-full of charge and my choice motifs are all borrowed from the weighty catalogs of 007 and Richard Nixon’s Watergate scandal – wiretapping, martinis, guns, honeypots. What other totem of life in the capital can evoke such romanticism as intelligence and its agents? Fifty years of Cold War cultural artifacts have left their imprint on the public imagination and, as America will never be a country without enemies, there will always be someone to spy on – so, the culture lives on. “I think he’s a spy,”........

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