To our interview collection of occupants of the office (Henry Kissinger, Cyrus Vance, George Schultz, Madeline Albright) we must add Warren Christopher. He  filled that most important cabinet position during all of the first term of Bill Clinton. Here in 2001 he reminisces about such problems as Bosnia, Haiti, NAFTA and Yeltsin on his good and bad (drunken) days.

The question has often been asked. Here, former CIA Director William Colby addresses one  famous instance: the case of KGB defector Yuri Nosenko. Curiously, one important CIA personage, James Jesus Angleton, ended by madly accusing Colby himself of being a double agent of the KGB!

Yes, of course. The list is a long one that does not begin and end with Edmund Burke. Here is a discussion with a thoughtful and well-informed historian who has done a fine book about 14 American conservatives who help to define that political species.

Two makers of modern dictionaries discussed their always challenging task (decisions, decisions, decisions!) and the questions of why in 2003 and how all languages are always  in the process of changing.

Some of the earliest dinosaurs – from which the later and larger ones evolved – were found in the U.S. by Paul Sereno of the University of Chicago. Here in a 2004 discussion he describes how he and his student assistants went about finding them and extracting them from the ground and, dating them.