“... that if he so desired he could himself be the president ... It did not require the election of Ronald Reagan to demonstrate that at this point in their history, Americans feel most fulfilled by leaders who are, or at least resemble, movie stars ... No less an expert than Richard Nixon assured Elvis that he had the power over people’s imaginations ...”

“... their task. Worst of all are the heroes Raban hears praised most often: complacent naysayers like Ronald Reagan with his Hollywood pieties, and the ‘twinkling demagogue’ John Paul II, who toured America while Raban was on the river. Raban does encounter one local hero worth following, and in Memphis, Tennessee, he abandons his river journey for a few ...”

“... no such thing. Then there was President Carter himself. After being beaten in the 1980 Election by Ronald Reagan, Carter had an understandable yearning to be taken seriously, and Abedi took him very seriously indeed. The holy banker flew round and round the world with the exPresident so that both men could declare their shared faith in the importance of ...”

“... were aristocrats; she was by turns one of America’s most adored stars and a hate figure; Ronald Reagan invited her to his inauguration; she was Hitler’s favourite actress. Negri called her autobiography Memoirs of a Star and meant it. ‘Pola Negri is a star and she intends to play that role as long as she lives,’ an interviewer wrote in ...”

“... remodelling of postwar welfare states on neoliberal lines – should be copied all over Europe. Ronald Reagan did it, Thatcher and Tony Blair did it, Germany did it – so why can’t François Hollande do it? The fact that the global bank disaster scarcely touched Germany, with its strictly controlled banking system, means that its politicians, from ...”

“... that he would have such limited influence with George Bush as Margaret Thatcher had had with Ronald Reagan, he should have realised that he would, as the saying goes, have another think coming. Yet there he was at Number Ten for all those years. Politics is supposed to be a rough game, Blair is supposed to be a nice guy, and in rough games nice guys ...”

“... contradictory sets of facts, in the service of mutually incomprehensible agendas and ideologies. (Ronald Reagan, for one, believed that the explosion fulfilled a prophecy in the Book of Revelation, on the grounds that Chernobyl took its name from the Ukrainian for ‘wormwood’.) There is still much disagreement about what happened and why; even more ...”

“... around’. By 1980, a radicalised NRA was ready to make its first presidential endorsement, for Ronald Reagan. In 1986, the Firearms Owners Protection Act was passed, repealing or neutralising even the mild measures in the 1968 law.American Gun leaves no stone unturned in the story of the AR-15, but does everything it can to avoid taking a political ...”

“... death. Dyson’s book enters the fray over who gets to speak for the icon of Martin Luther King. Ronald Reagan, who had opposed not only the civil rights movement but also the national legislation ending legal discrimination and guaranteeing the black right to vote, was the President who signed the Bill declaring King’s birthday a national ...”

“... moral weaknesses and contradictions’, Fukuyama tells us. But the neo-cons credited President Reagan with ending the evil empire by forcing the Russians into an economically unsustainable arms race. As we know from the case of bin Laden and the Afghan Arabs, the illusion of having brought down the USSR can reinforce latent psychological tendencies to ...”

“... president to evoke a mixture of outrage, horror and derision both at home and abroad. Both Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush were accused, in their time, of endangering the legitimacy of the American world order. The cultural conservatism and overt nationalism of the American right is fiercely at odds with bien pensant global opinion. This culture ...”

“... their own post-election State of the Union speeches – take Johnson’s ‘War on Poverty’ or Reagan’s promise to ‘abolish nuclear weapons’. Not Clinton. Surprising everyone, he offered no grand project, did not claim a mandate for even medium-sized reforms, made no attempt to restart the healthcare debate and failed to preach on any subject at ...”

“... pluck the fire-breathing young conservative (at Marquette he had displayed a photo of himself with Ronald Reagan in his dorm room) devoted himself entirely to Republican electoral politics. Here, too, he started out as a failure, running a doomed state legislative campaign in a mainly black, Democratic district of Milwaukee; he was trounced by 38 ...”

“... this abomination.’ But the most bizarre example of the analogy is a telegram he sent to Ronald Reagan in early August 1982, when the Israeli Army was bombarding Beirut: Now may I tell you, dear Mr President, how I feel these days when I turn to the creator of my soul in deep gratitude. I feel as a Prime Minister empowered to instruct a valiant ...”

“... homes for the poor, he would spend the following decades housing them in jails.’During the Reagan administration Biden took part in the hysteria over drugs, and often tacked to the right of the president on narcotics law enforcement. ‘The drug trade,’ he said, ‘is as much a threat to the international security of America as anything the Soviets ...”