“... man is just beginning to take conscious participation in some of his evolutionary formulations.’ Richard Buckminster Fuller, who liked to be called Bucky, was born in 1895 to a family of stubborn, bossy New England individualists. Even the Fuller family cow was ‘tyrannical’, Nathaniel Hawthorne once complained. (Hawthorne was a friend of Bucky’s ...”

“... white) American pop – during a spell in the Army. He shows us a sideman playing for Little Richard (‘I want to do with my guitar what Little Richard does with his voice’) and, later, an itinerant with catholic tastes in New York City, listening to anything from the sonorous Ornette Coleman to Bob Dylan, the ...”

“... John Bolton, the role of empire-minder has been taken over by Democrats and the anti-Trump media. (Richard Haass, the president of the Council on Foreign Relations, accordingly averred that any withdrawal from Syria is as unthinkable as withdrawal from Germany or Japan would be. Having those permanent garrisons abroad ‘keeps countries from doing things you ...”

“... the ‘Harold Carswell factor’, which I name in honour of a mediocre Southern judge nominated by Nixon for the Supreme Court, a nomination defended on the grounds that he would provide a much-needed voice for lots of other mediocre people too. These kinds of identification suggest what voting often means in the US today: people vote for substantive ...”

“... was another name for ‘excellence’. In the campus emergency of 1968 he even publicly endorsed Richard Nixon. In general, however, Strauss eschewed official bromide or partisan pronouncement; that was the role not of the teacher but of the taught. The veiled pole star of Strauss’s journey through the past was Nietzsche, the one modern thinker who ...”

“... American poet Alice Goodman wrote two libretti for the American minimalist composer John Adams: Nixon in China, with a text mostly in rhyming couplets, and The Death of Klinghoffer. She has also finished fresh dialogue for a Glyndebourne production of The Magic Flute (all of this under the auspices of the American director Peter Sellars). Robert Lowell ...”

“... its ups and downs of the 1960s and 1970s, the CIA never really lost this central thrust. In the Nixon period the Agency attracted into its ranks some quite remarkable ‘cowboys’, gung-ho for even the riskiest and most illegal operations. Stansfield Turner, Carter’s CIA chief, quickly discovered that his instructions to rein in on covert operations were ...”

“... head of the World Bank) and Jesse Helms. The real high point came, however, when President Nixon, warmed by the Moonies’ unconditional support for him during Watergate, invited Moon to the White House, where the two men prayed together. Nixon’s fall was a grievous blow to Moon, who immediately set out on a ...”

“... only in the 1970s, after DDT was banned and environmental protections were put in place during the Nixon administration, that the double-crested cormorant began its second return. Today the bird is found not only along the coasts, where most cormorants live, but also in the interior, where fishermen in the Great Lakes and fish farmers in the South have ...”

“... 1953. On every visit the congressmen trawled for witnesses with a maximum of tabloid publicity. Richard Nixon’s career was partly forged on the first of these occasions. He served on the original committee, and would soon run for the Senate. Reagan’s earliest thoughts of switching to politics seem to have come just after the war during a sojourn at ...”

“... it over with. No more appeasement.’ His popularity soared.After two terms as governor, and with Nixon leaving the White House in disgrace, Reagan was ready to run for the presidency. He fell short of the nomination in 1976, but another chance came along quickly. In 1980, President Jimmy Carter was an invitingly vulnerable opponent. The country was awash in ...”

“... Diane Sawyer, as she moves from ‘Henry K’s lap’ to the former Assistant Secretary of State Richard Holbrooke to her current husband, Hollywood director, Mike Nichols. Sawyer, also circulating from the Nixon White House to CBS’s 60 Minutes to ABC’s Prime Time, earns almost as much in a single day as is earned in a ...”

“... by the plagiarism police, he produced solid biographies of Eisenhower in two volumes (1983-84) and Nixon in three (1987-91). And though William McFeely won a Pulitzer Prize for his Grant (1981), that did not deter Jean Edward Smith from publishing a massive new Grant (2001), which some politicians have been reading with furtive pleasure because it finds that ...”

“... not one novel but two. The first is Hystopia, which was published by Faber and blurbed by Richard Ford and is being reviewed right here in front of your very eyes. The second is also called ‘Hystopia’, but this one, as that shift in typography suggests, purports to be a posthumously discovered manuscript by Eugene Allen, a young Vietnam veteran ...”

“... is gross-out comedy? This is transgression? Wasn’t I doing something a whole lot more full-on in Nixon’s first term?’ Yes, he was. It’s also easy to imagine Lenny Bruce watching from the realm of the dead and thinking rather sourly that comedy is all about timing. How is it that one foul-mouthed raging sex-obsessed Jew uses bad words on stage, gets ...”