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“... won’t do here, either. We had Bob Hope there, of course. We were lucky, we didn’t have Jesse Jackson like we’re gonna have here.’ I asked how the funding worked. ‘Well, Washington has this idea that democracy is something you can sorta buy. They say: will it be free and fair? If we say no, not really, they say: well how much more do we have to ...”

“... has lasted ever since. But in his warm evocation of this boyhood, the kind you might imagine a John Buchan hero to have had, there is also (and not for the last time) a utilitarian chill. Aged 13, he allows himself to be seduced by the household’s part-time maid, aged 16, whom he finds in his bedroom in an inviting posture. Never one to waste an ...”

“... almost entirely barred from the militia and regular army, although during the War of 1812 Andrew Jackson called on Louisiana’s free Black militia – a legacy of French rule – to help defeat the British at the Battle of New Orleans. Jackson, who owned many slaves, issued an address condemning the exclusion of Blacks ...”

“... Gathered together last August with their host Alan Greenspan, chairman of the Federal Reserve, in Jackson, Wyoming (which instantly became the world’s premier resort), the central bankers congratulated themselves at length on their success in reducing inflation by keeping real interest rates high; they did not pause to deplore miserable growth rates, but ...”

“... soundbox – captured the spirit of the new music in the same way that the voice of Mahalia Jackson identified Gospel. John Smith’s discography of Johnny Cash, who was resident in Memphis at the time and also benefited from Phillips’s expertise, contributes to the idea of a movement. Presley’s ...”

“... history. The chapter on CIA infiltration of the art world is riddled with howlers (that John Hay Whitney had his ‘own’ museum is one among several mistakes of this sort), but the gist of her argument about Abstract Expressionism and its uses as propaganda is correct, if not wholly original. Who Paid the Piper? is even so a major work of ...”

“... both those guys; they are very savvy businessmen.’ One can’t imagine Franklin Roosevelt or John Kennedy saying such a thing, or wanting to say it. They had known ‘those guys’ all their lives and felt no tingle of reflected glory. Obama has not yet recognised that his conspicuous relish of his place among the elite does him two kinds of harm: it ...”

“... mid-Atlantic accents instead of Alcott’s Yankee vernacular. Laurie’s grandfather is played by John Neville, and the scenes, whether meant for Concord, Boston or New York, have that interchangeable Merchant/Ivory, Masterpiece Theatre look. The Anglo-American effect isn’t totally off base. Both ‘Marmee’ and Louisa herself thought of the Alcott sisters ...”

“... in particular the mongoloid type or Down’s syndrome, first identified at Earlswood by Dr John Langdon Down. There was, however, more to this transformation than the mere growth of administrative protocol. Long-term shifts were occurring in the philosophy of what constituted idiotism, as is outlined here in a superb essay by C.J. Goodey. Theologians ...”

“... and to co-ordinate and finance standing armies. Nearly a decade ago, in The Sinews of Power, John Brewer undermined the foundations of this view of British exceptionalism with his portrait of an 18th-century British state that was, in key respects, large, strong, militarised, modern and highly bureaucratic. The British Navy, no less than Continental ...”

“... by all the other literature-soaked rhetorics currently available. A neat chapter on the explorer John Charles Frémont serves to make a similar point: Fender shows Frémont moving between picturesque modes of writing and scientific recording – ‘sometimes the oscillation between the two modes is nervously rapid’ (‘nervous’ – what else!). There is ...”

“... Others, such as Nelson Algren (the director of its Illinois branch), Conrad Aiken, Saul Bellow and John Cheever, had already begun to make their reputations. Studs Terkel would find his calling when the FWP sent him out onto the streets of Chicago to collect oral history. Most striking was the impetus given to the careers of black authors: Zora Neale ...”

“... for almost thirty years, over which time it had attracted some notable members, including Jackson Pollock, Richard Price and Judy Collins. But its more disturbing practices had passed unnoticed by the wider world until the Voice ran its exposé. Even then, as members defected and word spread of the grotesque cruelties perpetrated in the name of its ...”

“... the Fanny Bowditch Katz papers. She was the niece of the important American neurologist James Jackson Putnam, and when she became desperately depressed following the death of her physician father, he sent her to Jung. The treatment almost fell apart during the first year, and the stormy letters exchanged between her, Jung and Uncle Jim are of historical ...”

“... Holocaust has taken hold among American Jews precisely because they are not victims. When Jesse Jackson said in 1979 that he was ‘sick and tired of hearing about the Holocaust’, he was repeatedly criticised by Jewish organisations because of his espousal of the Palestinian cause. But it was not insignificant that ...”