“... was 10.2 per cent in October 2009). Jimmy Carter, who had appointed Volcker, was crushed by Ronald Reagan in the 1980 presidential election. But inflation was brought under control, and the lesson was learned: central banks must not concern themselves with the election cycle if they are to guarantee price stability. By the end of the 1990s, most of ...”

“... made. He slept with starlets – and then, in 1953, he married one. Patricia Neal, co-star with Ronald Reagan in The Hasty Heart and former lover of Gary Cooper, was infinitely glamorous and their marriage was more or less instantly unhappy, since Neal wanted to be a movie star and Dahl wanted to be more than a movie star’s husband. Moreover, he ...”

“... Clifton White, the political strategist who engineered the Goldwater nomination in 1964) had hoped Ronald Reagan would be the nominee, the party quickly coalesced around Nixon, who sailed to victory in the primaries. He was no one’s idea of a dream candidate. He had lost a presidential election once before, in 1960, albeit by the narrowest of ...”

“... it had lost a war which hadn’t been worth fighting in the first place. This was around the time Ronald Reagan observed: ‘Boy, I saw Rambo last night. Now I know what to do next time this happens.’ The moment had come to fix the blame where it properly belonged: not on Lyndon Johnson, not on Richard Nixon, but, as Burke points out, on the oldest ...”

“... from the 1980s acquired an enthusiastic libertarian following (Milton Friedman, Friedrich Hayek, Ronald Reagan). Increasing wealth shouldn’t be seen as a drain on the earth’s resources. Rather, wealth and new technology call forth new supplies, new methods for finding and extracting them, and new alternatives to existing resources. More people means ...”

“... his service in Vietnam and his work with Henry Kissinger; and the camera lingers on pictures of Ronald Reagan on Robert Parker’s walls. But it’s an honest enough movie to distribute the blame for global homogenising tendencies, if not quite honest enough to admit that there’s never been a time when the world’s wine drinkers have had a greater ...”

“... with the self-dramatising tendencies of the political characters, tendencies that will produce Ronald Reagan, Vidal’s ‘Acting President’ (who was in office when the novel was being written). By the early 1920s everyone in the book, not just Caroline and her Hollywood cronies, is meant ‘to think like a movie’. The chief political characters ...”

“... healthcare, pensions, low-income housing, education, social services and incarceration. As Ronald Reagan put it in 1986, ‘the most terrifying words in the English language are: “I’m from the government, and I’m here to help.”’The assumptions of the Anglo-American mainstream have remained unchanged for decades, despite the dramatic rise ...”

“... the disparate elements of the American Right into the great crusade which was to culminate in Reagan’s election in 1980. Rising Tide was warmly greeted by Barry Goldwater and its columns featured articles by such luminaries of the conservative movement as Congressman Larry McDonald (head of the John Birch Society), Fred and Phyllis Schafly, Ray Cline ...”

“... straight away, that the attack was an appalling error, the US compounded its mistake: President Reagan claimed self-defence and the ship’s commander and crew were awarded high military honours. Two days after the downing of the Iranian airbus, Tehran Radio condemned the attack as an act of naked aggression and announced it would be avenged ‘in ...”

“... of domination by the Democratic Party, as had been the case from the 1930s until 1980, when Ronald Reagan restored normality and routed the commies. Rumsfeld had for the past week been ubiquitous in the American media, hawking a phone app he had helped devise called Churchill Solitaire, based on a card game taught to him by another diplomat during ...”

“... the decade that followed, his was still the third most cited name in the American press, behind Ronald Reagan and Elizabeth Taylor. He went on to advise presidents of all stripes, commanded huge fees on Wall Street, was lionised in China and feted by publishers. This has continued into his late nineties. Kissinger has always liked to draw a historical ...”

“... in 1992. Prep was never more significant than in the debates of 1980 and 1984, in both of which Ronald Reagan’s surrogate opponent was David Stockman, a young former radical who went on to head the Office of Management and Budget before resigning over the budget deficit in Reagan’s second term. Stockman had been ...”

“... anti-apartheid activists faced in forcing European and American leaders to impose sanctions when Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher sympathised with the Pretoria regime. Walter’s attribution of the fall of apartheid to pity, white-collar public outrage, elite wisdom, capitalist pragmatism and demographic determinism is odd in a book about civil ...”

“... Goldwater (‘regarded more than any other living American with almost universal affection’) and Ronald Reagan (‘about to engage in a great enterprise – indeed this occasion is at once his last, and unlikeliest, chance to back out’). Peering out elf-like from the convivial flux was Oakeshott. Perhaps we should imagine the young Mount ...”