“... right-wing policies. It is remarkable in these circumstances that anyone wants to succeed William Hague as leader. What should he or she do? The most obvious strategy is just to hang on. The Conservatives are the official opposition and one of the two major parties of the state. The presumption must be that sooner or later Labour will falter and the ...”

“... found the ‘unostentatious luxury, the atmosphere of culture ... soul satisfying’; Jacqueline Kennedy found the old man to be a ‘kind of god-like creature, in the way he doesn’t fit in with the hurly-burly pattern of our present world’. Berenson’s recorded utterances sound all too self-consciously sagacious. ‘Young John Carter Brown, who one day ...”

“... Vietnam. We see them anyway, collected in Slotkin’s book and in Warrior Dreams (1994) by James William Gibson. When Philip Caputo joined the Marines, he saw himself ‘charging up some distant beachhead, like John Wayne in Sands of Iwo Jima’. ‘War movies with John Wayne’ sent Ron Kovic to Vietnam: ‘Yes, I gave my dead dick for John Wayne,’ he ...”

“... getting no time to take breath for les événements in France and the shooting of Robert Kennedy. Then comes the invasion of Czechoslovakia, the drama in the streets at the Chicago Democratic Convention, the butchery at the Mexico Olympics and the brave (now seemingly almost quixotic) We Shall Overcome moments of the first citizens’ movement in ...”

“... to perceive a particular thing to be imperfect, we must have in mind some ideal of perfection. William McGonagall’s ‘Tay Bridge Disaster’ is famously considered one of the most thoroughly bad poems ever composed. In the winter of 1879 the Tay Bridge collapsed as a train crossed it, killing all the passengers. McGonagall’s poem begins: Beautiful ...”

“... to think tanks. Leading the rightist rising were the conservative intellectuals in the orbit of William F. Buckley’s National Review and the zealous campus activists of Young Americans for Freedom (a group ultimately larger and far more influential than the much celebrated leftist Students for a Democratic Society), as well as members of the staunchly ...”

“... shoot a gun and look comfortable in front of the camera. There was no direction to speak of. William Boyd, who played Hopalong Cassidy, was, as Lee Server notes in his extremely long but enjoyable Robert Mitchum: Baby, I Don’t Care, ‘a scrupulous underplayer’, who made everything he did look natural and never upstaged or demanded close-ups. Mitchum ...”

“... care ‘reform’.When I want to recall those Leckford Road days, I can turn up a letter that William Jefferson Clinton wrote, on 3 December 1969, to a certain Colonel Holmes of the University of Arkansas Reserve Officers Training Corps. Clinton wanted to clarify his attitude to the military draft:Let me try to explain. As you know, I worked for two years ...”

“... of Sea Power upon History (1890), we might stress the derring-do of the Royal Navy, or – as Paul Kennedy did recently – the role of public finance. Brewer concentrates on organisational factors, and isolates three that were crucial. First and foremost, Britain’s army and navy trebled in size in the century after the Glorious Revolution. By the 1740s, the ...”

“... Party that represented the corrupt, gerrymandering and racist establishment. He viewed the Kennedy election, in which he took a junior’s part, as one more ‘delivery’ of the Georgia vote by the local patronage system. This is a truer account of the origins of ‘Camelot’ than many sentimental retrospectives allow. But now it is the Republican ...”

“... Before he became an outspoken liberal in the 1960s, he was a protégé of the arch-conservative William Buckley Jr. And, as Wills mentions, Buckley himself had been a disciple of James Burnham. Buckley and Burnham were two of the influential intellectuals who fanned the flames of anti-Communism in the 1950s from outside the national security ...”

“... resulting trial of the pro-Darwin teacher John Scopes pitted the attorney Clarence Darrow against William Jennings Bryan, the ex-Populist and fervent evangelical. Bryan, who had been secretary of state in Woodrow Wilson’s first administration, was persuaded to take the stand as a witness for the truth of the Bible; Darrow delighted his captive audience of ...”

“... to illegally disrupt antiwar, civil rights and left groups; and colluded with presidents Kennedy and Nixon to smear Martin Luther King into (they hoped) suicide. I remember being startled by his entrance into the living room. A pile of Black Sunset, newly arrived from the American publisher, was on the hallway table. As he came in, Clancy jostled the ...”

“... by private consultants they plan to remake Afghanistan in much the way their forebears in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations sought to forge a new Vietnam alongside the backroom boys from the Rand Corporation. As in Vietnam, indigenous resistance to the American project is hindering its realisation. Security is an obsession, the precondition for ...”

“... those traits which are the very antithesis of modern republicanism’. On the other hand, Dennis Kennedy has just described the Northern Irish state under Unionism as a ‘democracy’. The statelet was not a democracy, it was a holding operation which its founding fathers, Carson and Craig, thought would last only thirty years beyond 1921. It’s high ...”