David Edgar

Ellen Terry was the youngest daughter of two touring players, and began her own stage career at the age of six. Ten years later, she married a painter three times her age; they separated within ten months. Three years after that, she took up with the architect Edward William Godwin. They did not marry, but had a daughter and son together, and the expense of their upkeep drove her back to the...

There’s an old adage about American presidential debates: nobody ever remembers the feed-line, only the response. Geraldine Ferraro is remembered for rounding on George Bush Sr in 1984 for patronising her, as is her 1988 successor Lloyd Bentsen – with an equally questionable excuse – for accusing Dan Quayle of comparing himself to President Kennedy. In the last of the three 2008 presidential debates it was the counter-blows that will probably be forgotten. Certainly, Barack Obama had and has effective voting data to counter the implication of McCain’s effective one-liner (‘I’m not President Bush. If you wanted to run against President Bush, you should have run four years ago’) while McCain was unable to recover from Obama’s equally well-rehearsed counter to the charge that he ‘pals around with terrorists’.

With three down and one to go, it’s clear that the 2008 debate season is fitting the pattern of every series since the early 1980s. No major, Gerald Ford-type gaffe, no obvious, Reagan-like knockout blow, but a careful, well-rehearsed negotiation for minute advantage, contests in which confidence, body language, expression, and even forms of address have proved as important as points of policy.

This year’s presidential race is the first not to include a sitting president or vice-president as a candidate since Dwight Eisenhower fought Adlai Stevenson in 1952. For the first time, a woman or a black person is guaranteed national elective office in a country that historically has been resistant to both. The two parties are neck and neck in a race in which – unlike in 2000 or 2004 – there is likely to be substantial crossover of support between the two main parties. No surprise, then, that the cycle of presidential and vice-presidential debates – starting on 26 September in Mississippi and ending on 15 October in New York – is being seen as the decisive factor.

Early in 1982, at the nadir of the fortunes of the first Thatcher government, a number of ministers sought to identify the causes of the riots that had erupted in British cities the previous summer. On 27 March, the prime minister herself blamed events in Brixton and Toxteth not on economic or political forces but on a decade. ‘We are reaping what was sown in the 1960s,’ she...