As a storm breaks over Washington, and the details of foreign "collusion" and intrigue over the 2016 presidential election break out into the open, I just happened to be re-reading Gore Vidal's The Golden Age, a novel set in the run up to World War II in which pretty much the same plot line plays out on the same terrain.

The novel is a reminder that nothing has really changed since 1940, except in terms of scale. Washington is still teeming with agents of various foreign powers, and, as in Vidal's novel, the British intelligence organization plays a key role, but then again the book is set before our much touted "seventeen intelligence agencies" were founded. Vidal takes us through the drawing rooms and editorial offices of Washington, listening in on conversations between characters both real and imagined. It's as if the National Security Agency was operating at a time when computers existed only in the realm of science fiction, scooping up all our data and giving us a bird's eye view of how the world works.