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Hope in the Desert

Eric Foner: Democratic Party Blues, 12 May 2022

What It Took to Win: A History of the Democratic Party 
by Michael Kazin.
Farrar, Straus, 396 pp., $35, March, 978 0 374 20023 7
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... system’ whereby party functionaries were rewarded with government jobs, and, in Andrew Jackson, a charismatic leader.The intense competition between Democrats and their rivals – the Whigs, and then Republicans – galvanised popular participation in politics. Political leaders became folk heroes, with nicknames like the Great Compromiser (Henry ...

Newtopia

Christopher Hitchens, 24 August 1995

To Renew America 
by Newt Gingrich.
HarperCollins, 260 pp., £18, July 1995, 9780060173364
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... His half-sister – he is a child of divorce and of name-change, just like his political sibling Bill Clinton – is a self-proclaimed Sapphist. In one chapter of this book Gingrich calls with an apparently straight face for abstention from pre-marital sex. But could anyone except an amoral child of the counter-culture have pulled off the ‘Republican ...

At DFID

Chris Mullin, 19 March 2020

... aid to poverty relief, thereby making impossible a repeat of earlier scandals. ‘A useful little Bill,’ Short whispered to me as we sat on the front bench. ‘It makes impossible many of the things that the Foreign Office keep pressing us to do.’ It went through with the enthusiastic support of the Tory opposition, whose spokesman even had the nerve to ...

The Nominee

Andrew O’Hagan: With the Democrats, 19 August 2004

... knowing John Kerry, and not quite liking him either. Heavily supported by Edward Kennedy (and by Bill Clinton since the Wesley Clark machine puffed its last), Kerry is famous for having none of Kennedy’s backslapping, song-singing, law-making brio, and very little of Clinton’s natural empathy and charisma. People noticed Kerry, they even trusted him, but ...

Trouble at the Fees Office

Jonathan Raban: Alice in Expenses Land, 11 June 2009

... his £750, the sum allowed for the purchase of a TV set. He’s since said that submitting the bill to the Fees Office was ‘a bit daft’ – a good phrase for the ACA itself, which was introduced in more or less its present form as a temporary fudge under Thatcher and was meant to boost MPs’ salaries while saving them from the embarrassment of passing ...

Inside Every Foreigner

Jackson Lears: America Intervenes, 21 February 2019

Franklin D. Roosevelt: A Political Life 
by Robert M. Dallek..
Allen Lane, 692 pp., £30, November 2017, 978 0 241 31584 2
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... he signed the Wagner Act that guaranteed those rights); his ‘share the wealth tax’ bill of 1935 was more symbol than substance, a gesture intended to calm the challenge posed from the left by Long. Still, he was a working-class hero – ‘the only man we ever had in the White House who would understand that my boss is a sonofabitch’, as one ...

Stupid Questions

Laleh Khalili: Battlefield to Boardroom, 24 February 2022

Risk: A User’s Guide 
by Stanley McChrystal and Anna Butrico.
Penguin, 343 pp., £20, October 2021, 978 0 241 48192 9
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... Committee, the former secretary of state George Schultz, the former secretaries of defence Bill Perry and Jim Mattis, and even Henry Kissinger, none of whom had any knowledge of haematology or phlebotomy, but all of whom could provide a gateway to lucrative Pentagon contracts. Theranos’s founder, Elizabeth Holmes, even courted Special Operations ...

The Little Man’s Big Friends

Eric Foner: Freedom’s Dominion, 1 June 2023

Freedom’s Dominion: A Saga of White Resistance to Federal Power 
by Jefferson Cowie.
Basic, 497 pp., £25, December 2022, 978 1 5416 7280 2
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... number of Americans, known as Anti-Federalists, warned of impending tyranny. To mollify them, the Bill of Rights was added to the Constitution, protecting Americans’ essential liberties against abuses of national power. Initially, no clear connection existed between freedom, whiteness and fear of centralised authority. (A large majority of the presidents ...

Mendacious Flowers

Martin Jay: Clinton Baiting, 29 July 1999

All too Human: A Political Education 
by George Stephanopoulos.
Hutchinson, 456 pp., £17.99, March 1999, 0 09 180063 3
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No One Left to Lie to: The Triangulations of William Jefferson Clinton 
by Christopher Hitchens.
Verso, 122 pp., £12, May 1999, 1 85984 736 6
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... of Richard ‘I am not a crook’ Nixon, George ‘Read my lips: no new taxes’ Bush, and Bill ‘I did not have sexual relations with that woman’ Clinton. David Schippers, the majority counsel of the House Judiciary Committee, hammered home the point in the course of his peroration during last winter’s impeachment proceedings: ‘The ...

Diary

Oliver Whang: Two Appalachias, 1 August 2024

... the South, offering them a new life in the mountains. In 1945, when his fifth son, William (or Bill), was born, Turner was one of four thousand Black people in Lynch. The town was by then one of the most racially diverse places in the country.I moved to Prestonsburg, a mining town not far from Lynch, in the spring of 2020 to write an article about a ...

Green Pastel Redness

Colin Kidd: The Supreme Court Coup, 24 March 2022

Dissent: The Radicalisation of the Republican Party and Its Capture of the Supreme Court 
by Jackie Calmes.
Twelve, 478 pp., £25, July 2021, 978 1 5387 0079 2
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Justice on the Brink: The Death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the Rise of Amy Coney Barrett, and Twelve Months that Transformed the Supreme Court 
by Linda Greenhouse.
Random House, 300 pp., £22.50, November 2021, 978 0 593 44793 2
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... eye than abortion. In Britain abortion was legalised as a result of David Steel’s Abortion Bill of 1967, but in the US abortion rights have never had democratic legitimacy of this kind, resting instead on the 7-2 decision reached by nine male judges in Roe v. Wade (1973). The justices managed to establish abortion rights in the absence of legislative ...

From Victim to Suspect

Stephen Sedley: The Era of the Trial, 21 July 2005

The Trial: A History from Socrates to O.J. Simpson 
by Sadakat Kadri.
HarperCollins, 474 pp., £25, April 2005, 0 00 711121 5
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... the outcome. The accuser can end up all but in the dock; the accused may walk away from a true bill. Churchill, well aware of this, wanted the Nazi leaders, when they were finally captured, to be taken out and shot. Roosevelt initially agreed. It was Stalin, who had found that trials could be exceedingly satisfactory in both procedure and outcome, who ...

Eye to the Keyhole

Tom Crewe: Pratt and Smith, 25 April 2024

James and John: A True Story of Prejudice and Murder 
by Chris Bryant.
Bloomsbury, 313 pp., £25, February, 978 1 5266 4497 8
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... of Christian Socialism, biographies of Stafford Cripps and – strange conjunction – Glenda Jackson, a two-volume ‘biography’ of Parliament, a critique of the British aristocracy, a history of ten gay MPs who opposed appeasement and, only last year, a book called Code of Conduct: Why We Need to Fix Parliament. Bryant was also the first gay MP to ...

The Party in Government

Conor Gearty, 9 March 1995

... no suggestion that Mr McGregor was involved in the decision. Other former ministers such as Robert Jackson, Tim Yeo and Robert Key have obtained jobs since leaving the government. Earlier this year, the current Conservative Party Deputy Chairman and MP, Dame Angela Rumbold, was forced vigorously to defend her £12,000 salary with a commercial lobbyist, after ...

The Devil upon Two Sticks

Charles Nicholl: Samuel Foote, 23 May 2013

Mr Foote’s Other Leg: Comedy, Tragedy and Murder in Georgian London 
by Ian Kelly.
Picador, 462 pp., £18.99, October 2012, 978 0 330 51783 6
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... to Augustus Hervey, now Earl of Bristol. In 1774 the duke’s sister succeeded in putting a bill through Chancery to have his will invalidated on the grounds of his widow’s bigamy. This sort of scandal was meat and drink to Foote, and there soon wafted out news, through the usual channels of clubland and newspaper gossip, that he was at work on a new ...

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